The PlayStation 4 Does Use The FreeBSD Kernel, Mono

[LN17]

I do not understand if PS4 is based on AMD Processors and FreeBSD, why the AMD linux driver is so bad. Should not be as good as on PS4?

[artivision]

D3D9 is dead, fyi. No modern games will be using it anymore once XP support is dropped shortly.
According to steam's hardware survey, DX9 hardware makes up a tiny minority of their userbase too.

First D3D will be abandoned as all, and for that responsible is open source with its advancement and emulation. D3D cannot be used as a prison any more. Second a 11.5 or a 10.4 profile game, can choose 9.3 profile somewhere at compiler level, and run on a D3D9-10-11 card. There is not a D3D game today that isn't possible to play with with a D3D9 state tracker or emulator.

[curaga]

Seriously?! If everything were licensed under GPL where everyone's work will be required to be shared, how long will commercial products will last? They worked hard on it, paid money for it, and you want it to be totally free? How will Sony Playstation will compete properly if you can clone it and SCE won't be able to earn from what they've worked on? Every code they made costs money, and naturally they have to make profit from it or else gaming industry will crumble.

Funny how I thought Sony was selling hardware, hardware you cannot buy anywhere else

[carewolf]

There's no proof to back it up. Link?

More so, if Sony HAD contributed ANYTHING whether they used FreeBSD wouldn't be up for discussion. The only way it can be in doubt and partially secret is if they contribute NOTHING!

[Veerappan]

Funny how I thought Sony was selling hardware, hardware you cannot buy anywhere else

Hardware that is basically a PC. If every line of code on the PS4 has public source available, writing a PS4 wrapper on top of FreeBSD would be feasible (or even modding PS4-OS to install on a normal PC). At which point, Sony's hardware sales diminish as everyone builds their own PS4. The things that would protect them in this scenario could be hardware-based authentication or signed code/kernel requirements (or another form of DRM which authenticates that the hardware was made by Sony).

That being said, the BSD license is perfect for a system like this. Sony is benefiting from FreeBSD and LLVM, but they are also contributing code back upstream. There's been tons of LLVM patches by Sony employees. Patches which they are not legally obligated to provide, but which they have felt compelled to contribute upstream in order to lessen their own ongoing maintenance burden. Having to rebase all of your custom changes whenever you want to get the benefit of upstream changes is great motivation to contribute to an upstream project.

Sony is not required to open-source all of their changes, but they are doing so (at least with some of them) anyway.

[mrugiero]

Hardware that is basically a PC. If every line of code on the PS4 has public source available, writing a PS4 wrapper on top of FreeBSD would be feasible (or even modding PS4-OS to install on a normal PC). At which point, Sony's hardware sales diminish as everyone builds their own PS4. The things that would protect them in this scenario could be hardware-based authentication or signed code/kernel requirements (or another form of DRM which authenticates that the hardware was made by Sony).

That being said, the BSD license is perfect for a system like this. Sony is benefiting from FreeBSD and LLVM, but they are also contributing code back upstream. There's been tons of LLVM patches by Sony employees. Patches which they are not legally obligated to provide, but which they have felt compelled to contribute upstream in order to lessen their own ongoing maintenance burden. Having to rebase all of your custom changes whenever you want to get the benefit of upstream changes is great motivation to contribute to an upstream project.

Sony is not required to open-source all of their changes, but they are doing so (at least with some of them) anyway.

Still, you said it yourself: "if every line of code on the PS4 has public source available". Although the criticism is not really valid in this case as they are actually contributing back, using a Linux kernel (or any other GPL software) wouldn't imply the scenario you depict, as they can make a lot of proprietary additions to user space, without using or modifying any GPL code, meaning GPL is as perfect as the BSD is in this case. In general, the case is that if they are going to upstream their changes, the GPL does the work as good as the BSD (I'm letting v3 out, because it does add some extra things that may be troublesome for some companies even if they plan to upstream or release their changes). But as far as I care, it's fine. They are using the code, they are contributing changes, and more important, even if they weren't contributing back, they are respecting the license the authors chose.

[Veerappan]

and more important, even if they weren't contributing back, they are respecting the license the authors chose.

And there's the real point. The people who wrote FreeBSD have released it under the license that they chose to use. Sony is respecting that license. The software in this case stays open, and even if Sony has a pile of private patches hidden away, FreeBSD itself has still benefited from the contributions that they have chosen to share.

I write open-source software in my free time. I generally prefer to release it under a BSD-like license so that individual users AND companies can choose to use it (and possibly contribute patches). I wouldn't be shocked if some of my code was used in closed devices, but it doesn't upset me. I still get to use my own code, and so can anyone else.

Regardless of how a company intends to use it, I've seen blanket bans at previous employers against using ANY GPL-licensed software just because the company was afraid of their primary products being tainted by the license (even if using it in a completely unrelated system). That being said, some of the stuff I've written has been released with GPL v2 or LGPL due to the licenses of some of the software that I've been building against... and the viral nature of GPL has generally rubbed me the wrong way.

[Ibidem]

Open and Free, keep it open and free to everyone.
<snip a ton of lies and slander>
Please, stop calling BSD open source. It is not free or open. It is bondageware and slaveware. Worse then proprietary software.

Wrong. http://opensource.org/licenses lists these:

http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause

http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause

For good measure:

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

The definition of open source says that a license must "allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form", and "allow modifications and derived work", including distribution under the same license.
(I note one other point: 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.)

And the guy who coined the term "Open Source" has used a BSD-style license:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gpsd.git/tree/COPYING

The GNU project specifically distinguishes between "Free" and "Copyleft", despite their strong preference for copyleft:

The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded.

[werfu]

I do not understand if PS4 is based on AMD Processors and FreeBSD, why the AMD linux driver is so bad. Should not be as good as on PS4?

Simply because Sony isn't using the usual graphic stack in their console. No XOrg, Catalyst or Radeon driver here. Remember Mantle? It's simply stream-lining what has been done for age on console hardware. Developpers don't need to use standard compliant API because the code won't be portable in the end. That's it. In fact, the rendering backend of the game engine developpers are gonna use will simply call an accelerated library that draws polygon on a framebuffer. Surely ready through the code you'd see thing looking a lot like DirectX or OpenGL, no need to reinvent wheel, but all those heavy structure those two API requires will be gone. In fact, it's not only a matter of optimisation. The PS4 is using the new HUMA graphic memory technology, which maps the GPU framebuffer directly into the CPU address space, allowing direct pointer access by the CPU and the GPU. Both classic API don't support that.

But I do wonder when we'll see HUMA compliant PC on the market. This would open's up PS4 / XB1 clone possibility and I'm dying to see Sony and Microsoft answers to that.

[curaga]

Hardware that is basically a PC. If every line of code on the PS4 has public source available, writing a PS4 wrapper on top of FreeBSD would be feasible (or even modding PS4-OS to install on a normal PC). At which point, Sony's hardware sales diminish as everyone builds their own PS4.

No, the GDDR5 unified system memory + HSA access make it so that you cannot get a normal PC to perform adequately at PS4 games, at least until a HSA APU with RAM of close enough speed is available commercially. That won't be happening in a year or two, which are the years that make most console sales.

A discrete system simply won't do due to pci-e latency; an APU won't have enough performance with DDR3. So anyone who wants to actually play games would still buy the PS4.

By the time that clones are viable, 3-5 years later, console sales would be small enough for it not to matter to Sony.