Qualcomm Calls To "Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qualcomm Calls To "Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good"

Next week at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be speaking about their Linux device driver development experiences and will go as far as calling for all proprietary drivers to be killed for good. They talk not just about killing proprietary drivers for Linux, but for all operating systems. Can the plans they lay out to kill all proprietary drivers work or is this just a big pipe-dream?

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17208

[johnc]

Quite a bit of irony as I'm currently banging my head trying to do something extraordinarily ordinary with a Qualcomm ARM chip, only to find that the data it returns is proprietary and you need a magic decoder ring to convert it to something usable.

[V!NCENT]

That's because they haven't build something that may see the light of day, because, from the ground up, they haven't taken any measures to avoid into account.

It's not a call to open source; it's a call to make something that you CAN open source.

Duh. RTFA.

[bridgman]

Many hardware vendors remain too tight over IP concerns. Even the open-source friendly AMD with their Radeon graphics driver this week found out after months of technical/legal review that they couldn't even open up some of their HDMI/DisplayPort audio code, etc. Not to mention, open-source video decoding looks like an impossible feat at this point.

Auggh !!

As I said a few times already, it wasn't *our* IP that affected the audio code, it was someone *else's* IP. I don't see how you think we can "be loose with someone else's IP".

re: open source video decode, the only one saying it's impossible is Q. We're saying it's really difficult and *might* not be possible.

[bnolsen]

Software patents begone! Everyone is afraid that patent trolls will mine any company provided released drivers for potential profit generating activities through the legal system.

[plonoma]

Drivers on themselves have no value. The value is in being able to control hardware.
I really like the idea of open sourcing drivers because many companies just abandon old things without support or anything. Sometimes not even stable, usable drivers!!! With Open Source drivers the community could adapt things to new platforms very easily.

[V!NCENT]

While everyone loves killer performance, the FLOSS AMD driver users are not realy into that and so I'd like to see work going into a good video hwAccel state tracker instead of a non-abstracted UVD that's only tied to Radeon anyway.

And I'm AMD all the way in terms of GPU's and prefer AMD x86 over Intel x86, while I prefer ARM over x86, because it's fucking rediculous that anything digital still needs moving parts (fans) and draws so much power, while an iPad 3 can deliver gorgious graphics and top notch UI responsiveness with 10hours of batterylife on a damn high res display>.<

[d2kx]

And I'm AMD all the way in terms of GPU's and prefer AMD x86 over Intel x86, while I prefer ARM over x86, because it's fucking rediculous that anything digital still needs moving parts (fans) and draws so much power, while an iPad 3 can deliver gorgious graphics and top notch UI responsiveness with 10hours of batterylife on a damn high res display>.<

This. 10chars.

[?John?]

Awesome, but there's a catch?

I really like the idea of open sourcing drivers because many companies just abandon old things without support or anything.

I absolutely love the idea of anyone being able to debug and improve the way my hardware works, but it's most likely never gonna happen, because the ability to force us into constantly purchasing new hardware by simply discontinuing it's proprietary drivers bears far too much commercial value.

[mrugiero]

Drivers on themselves have no value. The value is in being able to control hardware.
I really like the idea of open sourcing drivers because many companies just abandon old things without support or anything. Sometimes not even stable, usable drivers!!! With Open Source drivers the community could adapt things to new platforms very easily.

I don't know if you noticed, but it's evidently not THAT easy, since the open source community is dropping hardware too. Yeah, if you are a programmer you could adapt and maintain old hardware if you want. But there aren't unlimited devs, and not all the users of older hardware are devs either.
I agree, anyway, that it's far easier when it's open source than when it's proprietary, since you avoid the duplicate efforts and the reverse engineering, when you know how to code. You will probably have a full featured driver from the begining, and your task would be adapt it to API changes and/or applying new techniques. Other than that, mostly bugfixes.