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The Letter That Started AMD's Open-Source Strategy
An anonymous reader writes "In marking the fourth anniversary of AMD's open-source strategy for their Radeon graphics, Phoronix has published the letter that launched this open-source effort. It was a letter written by Novell SUSE X engineers and submitted to AMD management with their open-source proposal."
The OSS driver works pretty good for antique hardware. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well for anything vaguely modern, while fglrx pretty much doesn't support anything more than a few years old (and it does more or less suck.) Consequently, if you have anything but the fanciest (unless it's very very new) or shabbiest ATI card, you can expect it to suck rocks through straws on Linux. nVidia is better but shares many of the same flaws. However, middle-aged hardware is well-supported by the official driver, and amazingly old hardware is supported as well. That makes support much easier, and while shopping for older computers with Linux compatibility in mind, it makes avoiding ATI a no-brainer as well. This reduction in resale value causes me to value ATI less up front... But to the masses who will never run Linux on a desktop, it's fairly irrelevant. Most people don't buy used hardware.
Anyone want to buy a P4 desktop with an ATI Rage Pro in it? It runs Ubuntu just fine :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The difference there is that Intel doesn't have any IP in this area worth protecting.
Also, what you're conveniently ignoring is that most of the source that AMD has came from ATI and was prior to the change in strategy. It's not easy to go back and retroactively open source things for which you may or may not already have the rights. I'm guessing that there's probably a fair amount of other people's IP involved. And even if there isn't, the legal team does still need to go through and make sure that they aren't going to be sued for releaseing something they shouldn't.
Well now it doesn't _require_ firmware to be closed-source. And my understanding was that typically, devices that absolutely require firmware to even work at all, well those would be the cheap corner-cutters a-la WinModem - an unfortunate plague in the hardware industry. Really, if that's where we are, then motherboards might as well just give us a thousand socketed general-purpose output pins, and we'll push on whatever connectors we want and turn the whole thing into a glorified FPGA emulator.
There's always this pendulum swing - shitty mfgs push more functionality into SW/FW, things get too slow, so along comes a bright-eyed new guy with real hardware again, that runs nice and fast. Then the new guy falls in love with money, starts peddling garbage again, and the cycle repeats.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Yes. Firmware is just an enabler that lets your hardware expose the features you read on the hardware's box before buying it. It's not related to the specific uses you want to make of your hardware, it's software-independent, so you as an end user have no interest in tinkering with firmware (although being able to do so can be an extra bonus, in some specific scenarios).
Drivers, on the other hand, bind your hardware to a specific operational environment, and limit your freedom to use the hardware in any way you want. They limit the CPU architectures you can run your hardware on. They limit the choice of operating systems you can run your hardware with. They limit the adaptability of your hardware to new operating system releases. An open source driver that, even by interfacing to closed-source firmware, sets me free from all of these limits, is perfectly free to me.