Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 19:28:18 -0500 From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net> To: David Preece <davep@afterswish.com> Cc: Justin Wojdacki <justin@chiplogic.com>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT Message-ID: <3A414EA2.46B51BEC@bellatlantic.net> References: <Your message of "Tue, 19 Dec 2000 11:43:17 EST." <5.0.0.25.0.20001219111044.020739e0@mail.etinc.com> <5.0.0.25.0.20001219120619.020cbac0@mail.etinc.com> <3A4012A0.44B4CEED@bellatlantic.net> <5.0.0.25.1.20001220163018.01ada020@pop3.i4free.co.nz>
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David Preece wrote: > > A lot of the reason why 3dfx (rip), Nvidia et al. often feel they cannot > release open source drivers is that a substantial proportion of what these > products do takes place on the host processor. Large quantities of research > go into the exact division of tasks between host processor and offload > processor, hence a large amount of their competitive advantage is derived They don't have to publish the source code of their firmware, if they download it from the driver then a binary image of firmware would do just fine. > from the driver code. They cannot afford to release it. Furthermore, AGP > represents a substantial bottleneck to them, the protocol by which they get > information down it is also of great commercial significance. Asking for Sorry for a stupid question but why would not they patent this protocol then ? For example, PostScript is patented by Adobe and the only reason everyone is able to use it is that Adobe had explicitly granted this right to the public. -SB To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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