AMD's Hiring Open-Source Graphics Developers Still

[bridgman]

what are you waiting for mr bridgman

get your whip out and get them started asap

The problem with hiring experienced people is that they are already doing something important that needs to be finished or handed off smoothly before they leave. At least we don't have to wait for them to finish their thesis and graduate

on a serious note i want to ask if there are any agreements with Ms or Apple that prohibit open sourcing drivers used for mac os x and win (apart from licensed and DRM stuff).

ie lets say a new company appears and wants to use g3d across all OSs will it be able to do it or there will be trouble with something like that.

There is no general prohibition as far as I know, just (a) you need to protected licensed code (which can be pretty pervasive) and (b) you need to maintain robust DRM which often means protecting non-obvious things like memory management.

Building and shipping fully functional Windows drivers over Gallium3D should be possible, but you would probably have to ship in binary form. If you omit DRM support then it gets a lot easier.

[stalkerg]

Why?

Why not in Moscow? It was my dream - to develop an open 3D drivers. I'm sad!

[89c51]

Yep. We hired two developers in 2007/2008 but Richard transferred to another group recently. We have hired a replacement for Richard but he hasn't started yet. We have also hired a third developer to focus more on embedded priorities but he hasn't started yet either.

We are now looking for one more developer for a total of four (plus some of my time for better or worse )...

what are you waiting for mr bridgman

get your whip out and get them started asap

on a serious note i want to ask if there are any agreements with Ms or Apple that prohibit open sourcing drivers used for mac os x and win (apart from licensed and DRM stuff).

ie lets say a new company appears and wants to use g3d across all OSs will it be able to do it or there will be trouble with something like that.

[bridgman]

They provide documentation and have hired one (or more i am not sure) dev so far to work on the floss side of things, which is something really nice from their part IMO. And they will hire more as it seems.

Yep. We hired two developers in 2007/2008 but Richard transferred to another group recently. We have hired a replacement for Richard but he hasn't started yet. We have also hired a third developer to focus more on embedded priorities but he hasn't started yet either.

We are now looking for one more developer for a total of four (plus some of my time for better or worse )...

[bridgman]

Can anyone please explain this to me?
Why would AMD want to pay people to develop two separate drivers?

If they don't want their driver open-source why invest in it at all and not tell people to use Catalyst?

If the do want to have an awesome open source driver why not just release the code of Catalyst and have one driver to maintain?

Isn't it just not profitable for them to develop 2 pieces of software to accomplish the same task?

If the Linux proprietary driver was being developed independently from the drivers for other OSes you would be 100% correct and we would be wasting effort.

The real benefit of a proprietary/binary driver, however, is that delivering in binary form allows you to share code across multiple OSes without having to worry about exposing DRM-related features required by other OSes - which, in turn, allows us to offer more features and performance to Linux users than we could by investing the same amount in a Linux-specific code base. Any time you see a proprietary driver there's a pretty good chance that the same rationale applies.

The one thing that the proprietary driver can't be is open source - because of all the code it shares with other non-open OSes - and that's where the open source code base comes in. It also allows us to prioritize a different set of use cases so we can get another group of happy users while both drivers continue to improve.

[MostAwesomeDude]

Can anyone please explain this to me?
Why would AMD want to pay people to develop two separate drivers?

If they don't want their driver open-source why invest in it at all and not tell people to use Catalyst?

If the do want to have an awesome open source driver why not just release the code of Catalyst and have one driver to maintain?

Isn't it just not profitable for them to develop 2 pieces of software to accomplish the same task?

The Catalyst codebase provides drivers for all platforms, not just Linux, and it also contains HDCP information, which is proprietary and unreleasable.

[89c51]

But why not share code inside AMD so that the performance is similar? If AMD do have an interest in having a quality floss driver why start from scratch and not enable the use of code from Catalyst?

I think bridgman said that the catalyst code is shared between mac win and linux in an architecture similar to gallium.

They can't take that and plug it into gallium neither open source it (for whatever reason). Apart from that AMD never said afaik that it will write the drivers for the community. They provide documentation and have hired one (or more i am not sure) dev so far to work on the floss side of things, which is something really nice from their part IMO. And they will hire more as it seems.

[Lynxeye]

Because developing a real opensource driver requires to integrate with the existing ecosystem. Neighter Catalyst nor the Nvidia blob are good citizen in the open source ecosystem.

So a theoretical opensource Catalyst will end as only maintained by AMD because no real opensource developer will even bother to look at software which doesn't integrate with the standard linux graphics driver model.

Aside from this the legal review of the catalyst source code will likely cost them more than a few opensource developers for the next years.

[Shimi]

The propreitery and the floss one serve two different usergroups.

But why not share code inside AMD so that the performance is similar? If AMD do have an interest in having a quality floss driver why start from scratch and not enable the use of code from Catalyst?

[V!NCENT]

The propreitery and the floss one serve two different usergroups.