AMD and NVIDIA bitchfight over open-source?

[Hoodlum]

Ah, I forgot that interview. Thanks for bringing it up.
Maybe someday they will have the power to help out like AMD has done but I guess they don't want to exhaust their resources at this time.

Well with Intel effectively declaring war on them with larrabee (which was ironically later cancelled) and pushing them out of every sector they can (ruined their chipset business) they really don't need another drain on cashflow. That said AMD hasn't been doing well for years and they bothered to make the effort...so.

[BlueJayofEvil]

"- Unfortunately the vast majority of our documentation is created solely for internal distribution. While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort to go through the vast amounts of internal documents and repurpose them for external consumption."

Source

Ah, I forgot that interview. Thanks for bringing it up.
Maybe someday they will have the power to help out like AMD has done but I guess they don't want to exhaust their resources at this time.

[Hoodlum]

That's what I'm getting at. AMD released documentation without revealing 3rd-party licensed stuff. I don't think anyone expects them to hand over the proprietary/patented bits, but Nvidia doesn't seem to think open specifications are viable like AMD has done? Nvidia keeps saying "our driver has IP" yet that's not even what the question was to begin with.

Reading the phoronix interview with nvidia I got the impression it was more "no that costs us money, time & effort" / "you aren't important enough"

Here's what he said:

Q: AMD was able to open source and/or document a lot by separating out the parts they couldn't legally disclose. Similar problems have been cited as preventing NVIDIA from open sourcing their driver (licensed 3rd parts code, etc) or documentation. Could nVidia use the same strategy?

A similar strategy might be technically possible for NVIDIA, but for better or worse I think it is quite unlikely. There are several reasons for this:

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Snipped reasons for not opening the closed driver as they have already been mentioned earlier in this thread (the same reasons ATI didn't open fglrx).
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"- Unfortunately the vast majority of our documentation is created solely for internal distribution. While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort to go through the vast amounts of internal documents and repurpose them for external consumption."

Source

[BlueJayofEvil]

Considering they cross licence pretty much any graphics related patents (or they simply wouldn't be able to make a card) it can't be that. Likely it is some other companies IP in the driver which they licenced and simply cannot release. This was the reason fglrx wasn't open sourced wasn't it?

That's what I'm getting at. AMD released documentation without revealing 3rd-party licensed stuff. I don't think anyone expects them to hand over the proprietary/patented bits, but Nvidia doesn't seem to think open specifications are viable like AMD has done? Nvidia keeps saying "our driver has IP" yet that's not even what the question was to begin with.

[barkas]

Still, you have to admit, the NV guy has a point - their driver is still the best one out there.

[bridgman]

Besides, when you compare this article to "Australia bans A-cup boobs" or "Human beings are aliens; Celine Dion explained" I think it comes across pretty well

[bridgman]

I was specifically talking about drivers. I know that NVidia contributes in other areas, and that some of their proprietary driver bits get used in other open source projects (eg the CUDA lib for video decode which gets used by open source transcoding projects).

If the article had been a transcript of the actual interview, with questions and answers kept together, it would have come across with a completely different "tone" -- and if that transcript had been handed to NVidia their response would have been more along the lines of "yeah, I guess that sounds right... but our driver is still better".

In other words, too dull to ever see the light of day on anything other than Phoronix, B3D or similar without a major rewrite

[deanjo]

Glad Bridgeman got called on

Nvidia offers no support or collaboration to the open source community. In terms of open source, we’re in a totally different league to them [nvidia].

Sorry man, respect ya but that is total bullshit unless your specifically talking about and only drivers.

[DanL]

Yawn. Nothing new, helpful, or exciting here; just a lot of spinning...

[RealNC]

"Open Source" people were flaming ATI because they wouldn't give out the specs of their hardware so others could write drivers. Recently AMD gave out specs. Now what's the bitch? Go write the drivers you claimed you would write when you get the specs.