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Talking with Timothy Miller
barryman_5000 writes "Timothy Miller has written plenty of drivers for the open source effort and now kerneltrap has an interview with him on his newest effort for an open graphic card. He talks about his background, struggle with secretive 3D vendors and more."
Funny A similar argument can be made for any IP, including software patents (especially software since that's all the product is).
There might be a lot of R&D, but also a lot of crap.
Thinking that you can hide this precious R&D in software without anyone seeing is nonsense. (The software interface is all that is needed for writting drivers). Your competitor is going to need at most a few weeks more before they dissassembled everything. If that is enough for them to steal your market your card wasn't as far ahead as you thought.
This 'black magic beyond us mere mortals' attitude is exactly what is to blame for this kind of thing spreading. (ie NVidea not releasing specs to their ethernet chip which ofcourse contains a lot of expensive R&D) Most stuff simply isn't as impressive as those companies want you to think.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
These platforms, both free and non-free are valuable alternatives to the Microsoft monolith
I hate this. I don't use an "alternative" OS any more than I drink an alternative to milk or live an "alternative" lifestyle.
I know it's grammatically correct but it's the hidden implication that does my head in!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
All a decent specification document reveals is how to tell a particular chip what to do, not how that chip does it. Any competitor knows what a chip is supposed to do (you can get that information by disassembling a binary driver, or by monitoring the bus while you send the binary driver commands), so the only "IP" you risk losing is the discovery that your "hardware" features are implemented by the device driver.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
What's an NDA got to do with anything?
How can I possibly write and publish an open source driver to an interface, if that interface us under NDA?
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I cant work out if you're being sarcastic. You didn't mention running Duke Nukem Forver on it, so I think you may be serious.
;)
And thank you for being the first post to talk about the card and/or article, not spelling or grammar.
In the Article, Mr Miller says he's heard quotes "I'd rather buy a used Rage128 from eBay". When this card becomes available, my Rage128 (Pro Ultra) will be on ebay.co.uk. Just so you can be ready
I don't know if it will actually be an upgrade to my system, or a sidegrade, but I think this is like buying Fair Trade goods: those traded to afford a broad selection of producers some of the money thrown around by the rich developed world. I.E. I will buy one because I believe in the principle over (perceived lack of) the features.
Why because I am a zeolat?
NO!
I beleive in Free software, but this is a very personally selfish reason!
I like the PowerPC platform and like to screw around on it. I know that x86 is cheaper and faster, but for what I use a computer for the Ibook is plenty fast.
However I will never buy another mac product again because newer cards are either Nvidia or ATI. The current Ibook has a ATI 9200, which is supported by Open source drivers, which means that it works with PowerPC and x86.
Nvidia and ATI binary drivers are only for x86!
So I can not every have 3d acceleration on a powerpc machine again? If I buy this OSS-friendly video card I can.
I want stability, I want freedom to use non-standard hardware setups.
I want to get 3d acceleration in OpenBSD, too!! Not just Linux!
OpenBSD is very secure, but it's worthless for the blender 3d stuff I use because no nvidia drivers or ATI drivers work with it.
The point of open source is choice. And there are very real technical reasons behind keeping all the software I use free, too.
Read this artical about "pointless ideology" and you will understand what I am talking about.
http://lwn.net/Articles/100098/
it is very important to have the ENTIRE OS Free, and not just have it no-cost.
I type "has wrote" and nearly 40 comments about how dumb I am. Next time I won't even submit news and you people can go to kerneltrap for yourselves ;)
Thx mods for fixing it to "has written"
As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.
Well, that's fine; i don't want the silicon blueprints for their beloved R&D. I just want specs on the interface which lets me use that particular hardware. As much as graphic vendors would like us to beleive, there's not much that can be "stolen" from gfx card specs. Don't take my word for it; just check the ones available for older cards and see how much you can get from there.
I think GFX vendors are reluctant of releasing specs for a number of reasons. One, it leaves them in a controlling position, since they dictate what you will and won't be able to do with your beloved card. Two, some parts of GFX cards might contain licenced technologies (stuff like MPEG decodig, perhaps? texture compression?), but still, we can do without. And three, almost every major GFX vendor has been caught cheating in their drivers (oh, oh, "optimizing"), which leads me to beleive more than one common GFX card might be software crippled. Hell, ATI had a card in which you could unlock four pipelines with a small program.
Desiging GFX hardware is hard, and writting driver is too. Yet, why can't you release specs for hardware we bought? There's an amount of zealotry to the OSS desire of open-source-for-everything, but if anything benefits from open source, that is system drivers. GFX cards or anything else.
Sure, I don't see why not. With open specs, it can be ported to ANY platform.
My initial reaction to this project was "Bah, who cares about open source, my NVidia card works fine for under 100 bucks canadian".
But the more I read about this, the more enticing it sounds. I don't play games on Linux at all, so I don't care about that. And to have a nice driver, that is optimized for the new features in X11 like XRender and stuff would rock. The longer I use Linux, the less I want to bother messing around with compiling modules, so I don't even bother using the official NVidia drivers. Sounds like this will perform much better than the generic, 2D only, NV drivers.
Who knows. Might actually buy one of those. But his projected price point at $200 is too high. Even in my best "Stallmanesque" spirit, I can't justify spending over $300 canadian on this card.
Because some of us would like to enjoy 3D accelerated desktops in Linux without having to resort to eBay to find replacement units.
This isn't a pet project, it's about keeping the future open for all FOSS platforms.
I think you fill find this card goes no where. It will be slower and more expensive than the "closed" cards from nVidia.
I thought that at first as well. But I changed my mind after looking at the design drafts, the card specs, and the quality of the people involved. This is going to be the classic enthusiast's card. It's reprogrammable at the logic level! The uses aren't limited just to Linux video.
The point of this thing is to open it up to widespread hacking. I'll gladly pay considerably more than a commodity card to have it hackable. Just think, this thing could spawn a hardware demo scene for one thing.
I'm pretty sure there are enough like-minded people to make this project commercially viable. It doesn't have to take over the world, it just has to fly, then the sky's the limit. There is of course nothing stopping a spinoff card from being developed in hard silicon after the original is thoroughly debugged, which would bring the unit cost way down, and be much easier to cost justify. But as far as I can see, this is going to fly just fine as an FPGA design.
By the way, it's an OpenGL card. It won't support programmable shaders, at least in this version, but it will be capable of running Quake III. Of course, you will be able to implement your own shaders at the gate level if you are smart enough and some people certainly will be, I look forward to some mind-blowing demos. You could also set the gate array up to do something entirely unconnected with video, such as run a kick-ass synthesizer or image processing or encryption.
I want it now.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.