Slashdot Mirror
ATI Releasing Specs for TV Tuner
Jonathan C. Masters
writes "As you may be aware, a long battle with ATI has
been going on to persaude them to release developer
information about their TV Tuner products to the Linux
community. Well, it's happened! Sorry folkes, there is no
Web page yet (I was notified by a mail list). Checkout
this page for general info (CT:Seems to be down)
and this one for more ."
Someday we'll live in a world where specs aren't propriatary.
ATI, along with certain other (Creative) peripheral (Creative) manufacturers, has seemed very Linux unfriendly for a long time. It's good to see that they are recognizing the value of open specs, even if a little later than some of their competitors. Maybe I'll actually buy something from them, now. :)
-- lk t lv ll th vwls t f wrds. T svs lts f tm t wrt bt ts pn n th ss t rd nd mks m lk lk cmplt dpsht.
And for the record: ATI has been very cooperative, they believed that releasing their specs would give competitors an edge (which is understandable, wrong or not - I'm not going to debate that issue here).
As soon as we (Mostly Øyvind Aabling) managed to reverse engineer most of the workings of the cards, they realized it was no longer a secret and have been very helpful so far.
It seems a lot of developers are afraid that by releasing hardware info competitors will get some sort of insight into their products and an advantage in the marketplace.
Why is it no one ever thinks that by being liberal with their information they will in return get more hardware level support? Is there any history somewhere of company XYZ allowing info of their stuff to get released and getting burned by it? Yeah, it is sorta relying on social reciprocity, which is a social and not a legal contract...
It's not like being the Most Widely supported, understood, acknowledged, and programmed for is a bad thing, though with mass public release I could see a company losing some of its freedom, being tied to its customers when releasing new/future products. But isn't that actually called customer loyalty and having an installed user base?
One thing I can think of, if 3dfx released info on their Glide API, then other companies could ostensbily offer support for it, either as drivers or in hardware, and then 3dfx would seriously have to compete in an additional arena, since Glide capability would no longer be a sign of uniqueness. Heck, free coders could release better wrappers for Glide for alternative devices, like ATI's cards, which have *huge* installed bases, and hurt 3dfx immensely.
Or is that analogy and concept different than a hardware company releasing spec and info?
AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I don't really understand the mentality of hardware manufacturers who seem to think that publishing details on how to program their hardware directly somehow threatens their market share. After all, a "black-box" developers' guide doesn't really give anyone that much of an insight into how the hardware actually _works_, so I honestly can't see how their competitors can use it against them (the latest bogus argument I've heard for withholding specs).
Time was, in the days before hardware became complicated, when it was dead easy to write to, say, Motorola and get them to send you the specs for the 68B54 chip which was the key device in every Acorn Econet system. As a result, there were lots of different fileservers available for the Econet, and it was possible to plug in most computers you'd care to name (down to and including the ZX Spectrum, so I'm told!) to an Econet system. Did this harm Motorola in any way? Of course not - they sold many more 68B54 chips than they would have done otherwise.
If this recent announcement amounts to anything, this is a welcome change of tune - it's about time the hardware manufacturers took this line again. Producers of soundcards, 3D cards, tuner cards and PCI modems - listen up!
"If it's a bad idea, trash it. If it's a good idea, steal it and release the source code."
--
"This isn't the post you're looking for. Move along."
Actually, you can get a fair bit of insight into a graphics chip's inner workings by looking at the register specifications, and if I understand correctly this is indeed what they're worried about. I speak as a graphics driver writer
The main disadvantage to releasing your specs that I can see is that your competition gets to see exactly how ugly some of your chip architecture is. I can't mention names due to NDA, but at least one of the chips we have to program for makes me want to crawl under my desk and whimper - and I'm an excellent programmer with a very good grasp of graphics hardware.
Fortunately, their competition's chips are much nicer.