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Creative GPLs X-Fi Sound Card Driver Code
An anonymous reader writes "In a move that's a win for the free software community, Creative Labs has decided to release their binary Linux driver for the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi and X-Fi Titanium sound cards under the GPL license. This is coming after several failed attempts at delivering a working binary driver and years after these sound cards first hit the market."
I've been waiting to hear this for years.
This is great news! With proper sound card driver support maybe 2009 will finally be the year of the Linux desktop!
I eagerly await any driver that is smaller and faster and takes up less resources than Creative's.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Maybe I'm a tool for having one of these cards (Ok, probably I'm a tool), but the giant amount of bullshit I have to go through to get it working in Ubuntu is really the only remaining things keeping me from booting into it more than a couple times a week. With the free Codeweavers SW and this in the pipeline, I can't imagine a need to boot into Windows too often anymore.
Crackle-crackle-cr[STOP]
Halt! Are you GPL? Ok, move on!
aaah-aaaaah-ooooh-aaaah! [sweet music]
Seriously, what possible financial/business gain is there to have creative hide these things? Are they really worried about other companies stealing their driver ideas for their hardware? I know graphics drivers can potentially (or used to anyways) have a large amount of optimized code that could _maybe_ be beneficial to competitors, but sound cards?
The summary is misleading. TFA says that the source is available on their web site.
FWIW, you can't use the GPL if you don't make the source available.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Section three of the license requires that programs distributed as pre-compiled binaries are accompanied by a copy of the source code, a written offer to distribute the source code via the same mechanism as the pre-compiled binary or the written offer to obtain the source code that you got when you received the pre-compiled binary under the GPL.
GPL
Binary only? I'd say that's a draw, not a win.
I think you misunderstand. How in the hell would you open source a binary only driver?
Now I can play all those great games that got built on top of the open-source ID engines!
Perhaps this is a sign that Creative are fearing for their existence. I mean, with high quality onboard audio (7.1, dolby etc) now pretty much standard on even budget motherboards, aren't the days of buying a separate soundcard history now?
Other than musicians perhaps, I can't think that anyone, even gamers/power users would still consider a separate soundcard as a 'required' upgrade, or even necessary at all.
Creative is probably one of those companies that chargers a grip for access to their API. Open sourcing the drivers means nobody will pay for any API access anymore. On linux.
Just a shot in the dark, but maybe they had 3rd party stuff in the drivers and they couldnt legally GPL it...Dolby Digital, etc...and then they removed it now so they can? Just a guess.
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GPL. So BSD coders will have to rewrite it from scratch.
This is better than nothing, but worse than good documentation and worse than a BSD driver (that could be merged to BSD and GPL licensed operating systems).
{{.sig}}
Releasing driver source code reveals most of the same information that is included in detailed technical specifications. It almost always includes enough info to make a compatible, competing product, and often has enough info to greatly simplify the process of reverse-engineering the device.
A hardware company like Creative should be wary of doing this - it could really hurt their monopoly on gaming-oriented sound cards.
Not even gamers buy sound cards anymore. I bet Creative's sound card business is small fries compared to their consumer electronics business.
There was a story a while back about some company differentiating their normal and absurdly-expensive hardware pretty much entirely by having crippled drivers for the normal version. (the story was about them attacking some guy who published tweaks to make the drivers for the expensive version work on the normal version.) I think I recall that being the Creative X-Fi, if that's correct it could probably explain the closedness but not why they suddenly changed their minds.
Well, it's also possible that looking at the source can give you insight into the hardware design.
Creative Drivers. Slowly I turned ... step by step ... inch by inch ...
Releasing driver source code reveals most of the same information that is included in detailed technical specifications. It almost always includes enough info to make a compatible, competing product, and often has enough info to greatly simplify the process of reverse-engineering the device.
A hardware company like Creative should be wary of doing this - it could really hurt their monopoly on gaming-oriented sound cards.
Thanks for the assertion, but I don't think so. Why should I or anyone else believe you?
Who buys audio cards anymore? Home users get "free" HD audio with every mainboard, and these days the drivers just work. An audio chip is about as much a center of attention as a USB controller.
Does anyone know where/how to get a list of binary-only kernel drivers?
I tried to compile a list a few years ago but in 6 months all the drivers I had discovered had been made free.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Can someone please explain to me why this is tagged as 'hardhack'? I wouldn't exactly consider the open-sourcing of some drivers to be the same as physically hacking a piece of hardware.
This guy's the limit!
I'll vouch he's right, based on my experience in the semiconductor industry.
Still I think Creative made the right choice.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
He probably works for one of those Ethernet card companies that still thinks Ring Buffers are some kind of amazing trade secret they have to protect lest other companies copy them.
I read the internet for the articles.
Sound cards don't go obsolete nearly as fast as other computer devices. (I'm still using the same emu10k1 based card as when I started with Linux), so creative likes to force upgrades by not updating drivers to newer OSes (as they admitted publicly). Looks like they now want to recover some of the good will they lost when they sued the kid for improving their drivers.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
i don't know much about sound cards, but wouldn't something like Dolby Digital be handled in the firmware or on a dedicated chip? otherwise you might as well have the application (music player, DVD/video player, etc.) decode the Dolby Digital data to the raw uncompressed audio channels that are sent to the speakers.
so are they not going to do anything about the older cards? are the OSS drivers perfect?
Thx creative, finally! Now someone can fix your crap.
Maybe next, Creative will start making drivers for Vista?
(Seriously - this is not a joke)
This would've allowed for easier inclusion of the driver in BSD systems, without any threat to Creative — whatever extra freedoms are granted by the BSD-license compared to GPL, they are useless in the case of a vendor releasing a driver for their own hardware.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I still have my old SB Audigy 2 ZS. Will this work for it? I like EAX for games.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://bash.org/?24262
True but there could be NDA issues
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Thats exactly what many of us have been saying for 3 years! And not only that, even the video card manufacturers have long since made Linux drivers.
I was forced to search far and wide for older supported cards that were actually in stock somewhere. Now i can finally get _working_ optical input for my Linux machine!
I think it would be possible, if you hand-entered the machine code and stuff required for the file format format in a binary editor. This would be cumbersome, but possible. It probably would not be enough to compile and link the binary and then simply type the data into an editor. You would probably have to actually write the program in machine code. If someone actually wrote a sound card driver this way, I would buy him a candy bar.
I just made myself think of all those tables of binary in Nibble magazine that I painstakingly typed in. Some of them before I even had the program that ran checksums on the data to compare against published values. I nearly died.
AFAIK there is no EAX support in any of their Linux drivers or specifications. EAX is the only thing that separates Creative from the better (sound) quality, vendors out there.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
If "using the console no less than 5 times" is a problem, perhaps there are other options for you.
I gave my 70+ Dad an Ubuntu PC many years ago, and just recently moved him up from the old LTS to the current one.
Zero problems.
Maybe you need a mac, they are nice machines too.
Creative is good to do this, but not having MOTU, Lynx, Metric Halo, and Apogee support, keeps linux out of the pro studio desktop.
I remember this story once before, where apparently they told a user to STOP HELPING their existing customer base because they wanted to limit a user's machine choices.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/creative-audigy-xfi,news-891.html
Why the change of heart?
It was a graphics card, I can't remember which. Basically if you made the cheap card use the driver for the expensive card then they were both equally good and had the same features (but one was much cheaper).
It was Creative who did that, yes. That's why I'm so confused they've turned around and released the Linux drivers under the GPL.
I wonder - how difficult is it to take a driver written for Linux and write one for Windows using the information it provides? Is there some enterprising X-Fi owner out there willing to do it so the rest of us can have a non-sucky X-Fi driver for Windows?
Disclaimer: I don't own an X-Fi (after the incident mentioned above, I pledged never to buy one).
They got a jumpstart of doing that to AdLib so yes they have a reason to hide it. The orig soundblaster was well know (at least at the time) to be an AdLib + Voice. They DID THE SAME THING to someone else...
Given they never released a working driver for the SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 for XP (despite it being an incredibly expensive piece of kit back in the day), I wouldn't hold my breath. That was the first and last piece of hardware I bought from them.
It can be more clear, but it is clear enough what is meant. A paraphrase of the summary:
Their Linux driver, which has only been available in binary form until now, is now released under the GNU GPL.
There was a story a while back about some company differentiating their normal and absurdly-expensive hardware pretty much entirely by having crippled drivers for the normal version. (the story was about them attacking some guy who published tweaks to make the drivers for the expensive version work on the normal version.) I think I recall that being the Creative X-Fi, if that's correct it could probably explain the closedness but not why they suddenly changed their minds.
NVIDIA
Ubuntu 8.10 came out and I wanted to start with a fresh install, so I copied everything in my home folder to a backup drive (all your stuff is in your home right?). I had a few other backup copies on the drive and not all were from the same user (but they were all mine). I tried to view one of the other backups, but had to be root to do it. Instead of randomly switching between my user and root, I selected all the backup folders and changed their permissions to allow everything. Suddenly, errors started popping up, icons and text disappeared, and GNOME died. On restart, it booted to the command line and won't let me log in.
Turns out that somewhere in my backups I had a link to / or something similar. Changing permissions followed through and changed everything on my computer. It removed executable from everything. In the permissions tab, I never changed the executable field, so I didn't think it would apply that field too.
Not all problems have to be a driver issues.
Another thing I hate: Ubuntu windows don't have 'Apply' or 'Cancel' buttons, only 'Close'
Actually, most ethernet device manufacturers now make documentation available (Intel's is of particularly high quality). Pretty much the only one that doesn't is Broadcom.
To what degree? Sure, it shows everyone what is happening in the hardware, but it doesn't say how it's being arrived at. I suppose that if some new kind of data is being fed to the hardware for some kind of performance gain, it may matter; and yet this isn't graphics where shaving three months off of reverse-engineering a competitor's product actually means something; this is the stagnant world of gaming audio, where most vendors do supply specs. For what other classes of desktop hardware (desktop, because most enterprise-class and embedded hardware has needed to play nicely with Linux for some time now) does this sort of "head start" on reverse-engineering really make that much of a net difference on the bottom line?
And BTW, GGP, what monopoly? I know ASUS has a good card aimed toward gamers which was successfully slashvertised (and reviewed elsewhere) and has been supported since 2.6.25, so I'm sure that if all Creative had left were their brand name, they still would be doing no worse than they are now, however well they are doing.
Not wanting to get into another flame fest thread over GPLv2 vs GPLv3, but I'm curious as to their reasoning for choosing v2. Did they say?
Especially those of us still playing Unreal Tournament 2004? There is a longstanding bug with X-Fi's that prevents the in game team-speak from outputing sound from other players... does this mean someone might figure out what it is and post a hacked windows driver?
BE very careful. Does Creative have patents covered in the GPLv2 code? They could very well sue anybody implementing a non GPLv2 version of their patented software with a BSD license.
Write it in machine language, perhaps?
People do that sort of thing, still, although very rarely, for certain extremely small firmwares...
Welcome to the state of a lot of hardware. Winmodems and so on, where the CPU and driver makes up for the lack of hardware. It's cheaper (for the manufacturer) to make hardware with less in it and use software to make up the difference in functionality, even if it does end up using CPU cycles and screwing up the experience for the end user. That's why you can get a sound card very cheaply, but a good sound card costs a fair bit.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
You deserve to be modded up, that's a very good point. Too bad you posted AC!
I have been able to train my computer-illiterate father into something of an advanced amateur. I was able to walk him through flash-updating his BIOS over the phone, and he's since moved on to installing his own hardware and installing drivers and playing Half-Life 2 (never thought I'd see the day!)
I bet I could have got him using Linux by now using your method.
My theory is that people are just terrified of text - even though it's actually easier to fix things that way, they can more easily comprehend something with a graphical representation.
Why not? If they wrote the enitre driver in a hex editor the binary is the source. And it would also explain why it sucks so much.
No, I believe it was that they had licensed some functionality for XP but not for Vista, so they were no longer enabled in the Vista driver. Someone posted hacks to reenable the functionality under Vista, which required Creative to do some legal bitching as they probably feared those they were licensing from. In any case, maybe their lawyers realized that even if the open source community implemented something patented or whatever it's not going to make Creative liable.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I just built a new system and was looking to upgrade from my SBLive 5.1 w/ full EMU10K1 (not SE "software enhanced" crap). But after reading all the lousy reviews on the Audigy and X-fi I decided to stick with my SBlive, it sounds great. I've noticed over the years that while some of Creative's hardware is great, the software has been horrible, with the exception of WavStudio which rocks.
It's about time but I already returned mine more than 7 months ago and I am proud owner to Turtle Beach Riviera which works well in Ubuntu!
There's no A3D support for my Aureal Vortex card either. Which is a shame, because A3D was technically superior (real 3D hardware instead of just adding echo effects).
I'm wondering what all was ripped out in order to make it possible to be released under GPL. Such as for example is all the EAX stuff not there? See OpenAL for example of where Creative has binary only releases of several versions of OpenAL so that their version of the library can have access to all the features on the card while the actual open sourced code base is lacking a lot. Speaking of which is the open sourced OpenAL library still even maintained anymore? Because I see more and more game engine developers moving away from OpenAL (its pretty much outdated these days and ugly to work with) like on Torque game engine and going with libraries like FMOD.
This space is not for rent.
Ever think about that?
I got my folks and assorted older family members around the time of ubuntu 7.04 which is when I discovered PCLinuxOS and decided that it was going to be my family-friends distro.
The people how never used a computer had the same learning curve as those who learn on Wnidows machines or mac while people like my dad who used Windows needed a little desktop makeup work to make it look and feel like WinXP.
Of course those arent the kind of people I would walk through any kind of install. Theyre not going to be learning how to use sudo although my dad grasped the idea of installing games through repos rather easy.
They want to use the computer and be oblivious to everything. They dont mind being clueless like Mac users, and like them all they want is for the computer to work.
I'm not going to bother dusting off what were my state of the art X-Fi soundcards out of the garage. As with the copies of Windows I get bundled with the computers I buy, I won't bother giving them away or selling them as I refuse to inflict the damned things on anybody else. I'm not going to buy Creative again.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Creative releases source code?
/me looks out the window, searching for flying pigs.
CPUs (uCode patches)
Chipsets (FWUpdates, ROM code patches)
GPU (We all agree here I think)
I was just commenting that the GGGP post was accurate in that releasing driver source gives insight into your hardware. Obviously in some cases more than others.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
In deciding how to moderate this, I'm torn between my hatred of racists and my hatred of zionists.
Aargh.
They put many different prices on what is essentially the same chip. If others create windows drivers (like the guys at the kx-project) people can buy cheaper cards and still do the same they would do with expensive cards.
> But for 98% of the population, they don't *want* to touch that. You're not the first to say something like this and I tended to accept statements like that at face value. No longer. Based on my personal experience and those of my friends and coworkers, GUIS are nothing more than eye candy designed to "convince" people they know how to use computers. I would argue that GUIS are to computers as a TV Show is to Reality: Glamorous, Cool, but not the real thing. All that guis do in my opinion is to teach people how to be helpless when the solution to a problem can't be found by clicking on a button. So please, can anybody cite a real survey in which the majority of people when asked whether or not having access to a console terminal was useful said "no, it was not." I can't imagine people saying, "Damn it! I refuse to use SuperOS until they remove all console terminals from their OS!" That just doesn't make sense. That's like saying "Damn it! I refuse to drive a Ferari until they remove the GPS unit!!"
...or it could simply be a case of the emu10k chips they use in some of the Xi-Fi range is exactly the same as the one they use in the Audigy and Live! ranges.
It would be a shame if users could get the same functionality out of a card that comes for a fraction of the cost of their latest products.
They can. They own the code on their website and they can do any damn thing they please, including disregard the GPL for their website. It doesn't apply to them.
As soon as someone else contributes though, it's a different matter. But right now, they own the code, they write the rules in entirety.
It's because all their cards are the same but they turn features on and off in the software allowing them to charge more for some cards then others but still producing the same card.
It's also why Nvidia doesn't release the source to their drivers, it's been put forth by the Nouveau guys (the people making an open source nvidia driver) that the Geforce 7 series is the same as the Geforce 6600 series and that if you want your Geforce to become a more expensive Quadro it's a simple memory rewrite to a certain location on the card.
nVidia does it too, I recall tweaked drivers to get you some API that Quadro cards have that GeForce cards don't - related to 3D design, not games, tho.
Looking at there website:
Creeative Labs
I see no place to download the source.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
As already stated by others in this thread, you've confused 2 events into 1.
nVidia differentiates their absurdly expensive Quadro graphics card line by taking their consumer level cards and merely changing the PCI Device ID (which is in the firmware). The drivers then detect the Quadro device id and unlock their advanced high performance subroutines, otherwise the driver uses software emulation or some similar crap.
The second event was Creative however, they stopped someone from distributing hacked drivers that enabled the advanced sound card features on Vista as Creative was only providing those features in their XP drivers (and since Microsoft shitted up the audio stack in Vista, the old drivers wouldn't work out of the box). The problem was something about 3rd party licencing of various sound tech, don't remember what exactly.
When the steam 'scanner' gathers data about your computer, where does it get the resolution from? Desktop resolution, or the resolution you play games at?
Just because your monitor has 2560x1600 pixels doesn't mean your computer can give you good framerates at those resolutions. I have a laptop with a 17" widescreen display. I play most games at 1400x900 (or is it 1440x900? I can't remember the exact numbers), simply because most games' framerates start to degrade noticeably at higher resolutions (again, granted, this is a laptop, so it's not exactly a screaming beast, but I suspect only maybe 10 or 20 percent of gamers *do* have the screaming beasts necessary to pump out the ridiculously high resolutions).
If it is grabbing the user's desktop resolution, I suspect a lot of users might not run their desktops at the maximum possible resolution, simply because it tends to make the text and GUI elements (buttons, drag-able panel dividers) in many traditional programs *tiny* even with a large monitor. I suspect that most people only use the very high resolutions on their monitors to watch HD videos (and even those only benefit from 1080 lines of vertical resolution, so any more than that is essentially wasted [maybe some up-converting software could scale the image from 1080 to 1600, but that would just be scaling]? Although, I suppose the counter argument to that is, if you are going to buy a monitor which supports 2560x1600, you'll probably buy the screaming beast necessary to drive it at decent framerates (can any computers really output frames at such resolution at a consistent 100+ fps?).
They kept blundering about and dual-booters like me had no choice to stay away from their offerings or do without sound in Linux (not an option). Might be too late though, I just bought a nice card that _works_ in Linux from their competition.
On the plus siode, this shows that Linux is important. On the minus side, they could not hire one competent Linux developer????
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I usually prefer cli tools, so I don't reflect upon using them, even when trying out "desktop"-distros. But if the people who try not to use it take not of it, maybe they should start making lists of what they use it for. That way, those who create those graphical tools will know what needs adding. I have yet to see such a list.
Nothing bad intended. I seriously believe the linux desktop effort needs this sort of thing.
Just a thought.
I was under the impression that the Quadro cards also had different firmware than the GeForce cards. You need to flash the firmware, and use different drivers. But I have seen cheap GeForce cards get made into more expensive Quadro-equivalents through hacking.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
differentiating their normal and absurdly-expensive hardware pretty much entirely by having crippled drivers for the normal version.
you're not thinking about nVidia Quadro vs GeForce, or ATI FireGL vs Radeon?
you can soft-mod plenty of geforce cards to their quadro equivalents
I much prefer the registry as a centralized configuration store rather than rummaging around the entire hard drive to grab for .conf files, each of which is laid out differently.
.conf files.
Though, applications which require more data settings storage tend to opt for SQL Express or something like it, to which I actually prefer
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Pressure from Auzentech, perhaps?
"As for the Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1, we are in discussions with Creative Labs regarding a Linux driver. We project that it will be available at the end of 2008, since our major focus is on the HDMI product line and DDL / DTS driver at this time."
This has been on their website for ages. Yes, the Prelude uses the Creative X-Fi technology.
http://www.auzentech.com/site/support/FAQ.php#compatibility
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
I gave up on their products so many years ago I had to look up what an X-Fi sound card was.
But yeah, cool.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You can (could?) do that regarding nVidia Quadro series cards. There ARE physical differences though, so it isn't quite the same. Less and slower RAM, a more precise but slower pipeline, etc.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Just upgraded to the Asus Xonar D1 today and it worked out of the box with Kubuntu 8.10. After trying their driver and watching it segfault when it loaded, I'd had enough.
The first sound chip I remember was the C64 SID, I still love the PC speaker, I have not forgotten the Adlib, the first Creative card I remember is the Sound Blaster 8-bit, and you call X-Fi old?? :)
Why would you not want to make sure your platform is the dominant in the ecosystem of sound solutions? Once the competitors make compatible products, you get to define the technology and provide services for competitors and customers alike.
I was one of the very many who refused to buy creative again after the windows driver saga.
Kicking a private dev who made "working" windows drivers for cards creative wouldn't. And enabling features removed in vista drivers, that worked fine in XP. (i realise there were licensing issues but creative didn't comment on those just that the features wouldn't work on vista!)
The company line on this issue was so poor and stayed poor while their own forums were filling with complaints and support for the dev.
So I for one couldn't care less about opensource drivers for creative, all of the onboard cards I have work fine with existing modules and it's part of my buying decision on new hw these days anyway.
Good Luck creative i think you maybe needing it.
I think why they suddenly changed their minds was explained in the article:
They can't write drivers for shit.
Now if only Nvidia, ATI, and all the other hardware manufacturers that can't code their way out of a wet paper bag would go FOSS with their drivers we'd have:
A. More usable and speedy hardware.
B. A truly kick ass open source operating system that would kick the shit out of mac and Windows.
Sorry, am I not supposed to mention those other OSes? The debate above gave me all kinds of bullshit rules I'm not interested in following. Truth be told I bet you the FOSS Windows X-Fi driver gets more and better dev faster than the Linux one.... /me puts $20 on it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Seen them yesterday and tried them for the hell of it, they usually fail but these ones built and installed first time. About bloody time Creative!
I thought that there was 1 very very minor difference between the Geforce and Quadro, something about the Geforce going for speed and Quadro going for completeness, but when it came down to it you would get 99% performance
I might have to pick up one of those if it's the emu10k1 driver. That driver works really, really well.
(Although I keep hearing Creative's sound cards aren't good if you actually care a ton about sound quality--and I write music once in a while.)
So now we know he works at Broadcom. Case closed.
My guess would be "very difficult". I'm not sure what exactly would change, but given the lack of driver porting from Linux to Windows, there must be something. I've also noticed that for companies doing driver releases for a product in Linux and Windows, the version numbers are typically not the same and the release dates are never close. So I don't know why it would be hard, but I'm pretty sure it is.
What purpose is served by releasing a binary under the GPL? Shouldn't they release the source under that license?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Releasing driver source code reveals most of the same information that is included in detailed technical specifications. It almost always includes enough info to make a compatible, competing product, and often has enough info to greatly simplify the process of reverse-engineering the device.
This is a common misconception that must end. A driver does NOT allow a competitor to clone a device - it doesn't include blueprints, for God's sake. A driver is merely a "translator" between the device and the OS (in an ideal world, that should be it). Now, there are reasons for hardware manufacturers not to release sources for drivers, such as:
- Software market segmentation: Sometimes, in a same product line, the only thing diferentiating otherwise identical hardware is the software running it, be it firmware or device drivers. This means that a device could get features from a more expensive one merely with a driver update.
- Patents: Applies notably to gfx cards - some drivers use/implement technologies covered by third partys' patents.
- Plain old cheating: Both major gfx card companies were caught "cheating" with their device drivers, to improve benchmarks for example.
- etc...
Depending on the device, a driver might reveal more or less about the inner workings of the device, but that's about it. Don't take it from me - there's a lot of expensive hardware with open source drivers out there which never got plagiarized.
And by the way, Creatives' monotpoly on gaming oriented soundcards was hurt the second someone decided to include audio in the mobo chipset. Nowadays i'd rather have onboard sound from an nVidia or AMD chipset than a Creative one.
Nvidia have, historically, been the only company with a decent cheap full OpenGL solution in Linux. Presumably they've made the decision that most of their advantage over ATI is due to their better drivers and so there is no benefit to releasing them. I'm sure as soon as the GPL ATI drivers get better than Nvidia's (some people say they're almost there) they'll start thinking about releasing their code under the GPL. After all if the ATI drivers were to catch up then their proprietary drivers would just be an extra cost for no advantage, so better to let the community develop them at a lower cost.
I'm sure Nvidia have been aware all along that Linux users are often professionals, in fact their linux drivers are targeted at that market - if that market didn't exist those drivers would never have been written!
Nick
So, open drivers and/or specifications detailing how to operate the device significantly simplify the process of reverse-engineering to the point where opening up this information is cost-prohibitive?
CPUs have well-defined ISAs to shield the michroarchitectures from examination while still allowing users to operate the device. In those instances where there is firmware (i.e., Intel's mechanism), the firmware is opaque. How can an ISA be sooper-sekret information which cannot under any circumstances be made public?
As for other devices, those specifications detailing what needs to be set in what part of the I/O space to make the device work are just that revealing that making that info public is often cost-prohibitive?
Nobody this side of rms is asking for the source for anybody's firmware. That isn't usually needed to make a device work.
I can't help but believe that this is a massive failure in communication between hardware and software. And I don't mean the end products.
Wow your fucking copy of Windows XP has the latest hardware drivers for nVidia packaged in it every time you reinstall?
Could be worse. Next time you install the latest MS OS your older hardware may not even HAVE drivers... ever.
Fuck.
No sig for you!!
You mean, they decided to release their close source driver as open source? "Binary" isn't a useful term, all programs are source code before they are made into binaries, and they must be turned into binaries to be run, it's just the current state of a file and that's not what matters. The file's license is what's important.
So stop using that term like that, betch!
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.