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Free Software Friendly Graphics Card?
An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting discussion on KernelTrap with a hardware company that is talking about developing a 'free software friendly' graphics card. The idea is to fully disclose and document all register interfaces including the BIOS, providing Linux and BSD users with a fully supported video card. The hardware engineer proposing the idea summarizes his viewpoint saying, 'the whole issue comes down to this: This is technically feasible. Should we do it?'"
What? Create a functional and supportable video card that is platform agnostic and will just work? The problem is, it is too logical. Unfortunately, it won't work in todays economic environment. Unless you are screwing over your competitors, your customers, or your employees, you can't make a buck.
Until now, open source software has proven to be able to scare M$. Why can't open source hardware scare competitors of it's field? Obviously it's not the same but hopefully, if they all planned it well, and by the article it shows that they got a nice idea, I'm sure a project such as this would get sufficent support to progress.
"You and your third dimension."
Seems that most people here didn't bother to read the article. (Big surprise.)
This is a 2D only card. He would not try to compete with BigBadVideoCardVendor. He knows that development of a competitive 3D card is out of the question for now. But you have to start somewhere.
Unlike an opensource software project, an "opensource" hardware project can't "show me the code" in order to gain legitimacy and gather developer attention. He's looking to see if there is real interest so that he can make a case to his boss. He seems to understand the risks involved, and I hope he can make it work.
Which really brings to the other point.. how advanced (or backward) will the design of this card be based on?
:(
Let's look at the big boys, nVidia and ATi, apart from both corporations having a lower case letter where it doesn't really belong, both companies are pretty much at the leading edge in terms of chip design/driver optimisations.
Which is pretty much why they choose to release close sourced only drivers.
This new company... well, R&D is going to be expensive if you are thinking of making the next Geforce or Radeon, so what are they planning to make?
The S3 Trios of yesterday?
If that's what they are gonna make, what about profit margins? ATi and nVidia are doing so well converting lumps of silicon into gold because their chips are fast. A graphics card by itself is not expensive at all.
Doesn't sound like they are having a very viable business plan to me
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
A better question - who will buy it? I can only see one kind of customer:
- the person who only cares about "good enough", not "awesome" performance -
Because you're not going to equal ATI or Nvidia's offerings. The newest games will run much faster with the latest proprietary solutions. And we're headed for another revolution in gaming cards if you hadn't been following along, the return of SLI using PCI-E and multiple relatively cheap graphics cards. You can't keep up with product cycles by seeing what's out there now and expecting to bring out the same in 6 months or so.
- and who doesn't expect it to be cheaper than mainstream offerings -
You can't beat manufacturers who produce in huge volume in countries with low labor cost. It just can't be done, not even if your R&D all comes free from the community. Volume gets you discounts, sometimes spectacular discounts. It also gets you priority when parts allocations are made. Samsung (and distributors) won't really take much notice if you only want 10,000 3ns BGA memory parts but when PowerColor and Hercules ask for 10,000,000 that's another story.
- and who really really cares about the idealogical and hacky side of computing -
Here's your only point of differentiation - your entire value proposition, in a nutshell. It's not produced by "big, evil company X" and all the registers are open. Well sadly that's a smallish market.
In short the whole project would be a charity. A bunch of people would have to do a lot of non-trivial work which they could be financially well rewarded for were they to do it for any of a number of commercial enterprizes.
Which is fine if you can afford to do it...
I currently own a couple of nvidia cards. I enjoy that NVIDIA is providing 3d accelleration for my installed software. What this Free Software Friendly board is capable of is minimal. It's essentially an ancient 2d acceleration. 3d support is off the table. I can find that elsewhere; I think there's a few OSS drivers that do that with proprietary cards. Perhaps they can't work on obscure platforms. I don't work with obscure platforms regularly, thats why they're obscure!
From a ROI perspective, you have to convince me there's some improvement over the status quo. I couldn't care less about the source. I know that 3d graphics are among the most alien software topics to developers. Its difficult, especially when you're mixing it with low level programming in a performance sensative environment. Not providing 3d means I'll look for a second card. More likely, I'll be looking at a different card that offers more functionality, even on Linux, at 50 dollars, than this can offer at 100.
Simply put, an free-software friendly board lacks a community to push it forward, and I don't see it treading water among the highly competitive graphics card market. If you want this to sell, you need to identify and explicitly cater to your niche market. Promote it as a learning tool, and grease the community wheels. Just putting it out there and expecting the world to recognize its value won't net you much.
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