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Open-Source Qualcomm GPU Driver Published
An anonymous reader writes "Not being content with the state of open source graphics drivers for Linux, a developer working for Texas Instruments has reverse-engineered his competitor's (Qualcomm) driver and written an open-source Snapdragon driver. With being tainted by legal documents at Texas Instruments, the developer, who is also involved with Linaro, had no other choice but to work on an open source graphics driver for his competitor in his free time. The open source Qualcomm Snapdragon/Adreno driver is called Freedreno."
So, you took a competitor's proprietary product, reverse-engineered it and cranked out an open source version of it? And for this you and all the open source pundits here are proud? What you did was rip off other developers time and expertise so you could shout to the glorious interwebs that you are the first to push out an open source graphics driver.
Why did you need to reverse engineer their solution? The blog entry linked here reflected someone who seems to know and understand what they're doing. So why? Why didn't you take all that free time and just write your own from scratch? Then take that hard earned program and release IT as open source. That would have been respectable.
I expect to get labeled a troll here. People get their panties in a bunch whenever someone doesn't agree with the righteous open source zealots. You cheated. Congratulations. I truly hope TI recognizes that someone who will do what you did is not trustworthy. You may not have broken any NDAs, and TI may not have ownership of anything you write on your free time, but you have blatantly demonstrated that you are not to be trusted with anything proprietary. That's a serious problem for a company. Worse, you did it to a competitor. So no matter what your motivations were, you are a TI employee and anything you do reflects them, so you have dragged TI into whatever Qualcomm may decide to do because of your actions.