Originally posted by bridgman
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostOther than giving away functionality for free that vendors charge extra for today, and losing a big pile of money in the process, what alternatives are you (I mean "everyone posting here", not just you) suggesting ?
It's dishonest to sell the exact same hw with crippled firmware; if the hardware were physically crippled, then it would be ok. Whether this comes from natural breakage like defects in some shader group, or from designing a lower-end product in the first place doesn't matter. E-fuses on the other hand I would count in the dishonest category, the hw came full-featured from the factory.
I suppose the point of contention is the current practise of segmenting the area with physically the same product. Even if it may get more $$$ to the producer, most consumers see it as wrong. Best case it would get banned by the consumer protection laws, since obviously nobody will voluntarily cut their income stream.
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Come on, leave Bridgman a break. Firmware initializes hardware bits. Mark this very well. You don't need its sources to *USE* your GPU, in the *FOSS* world. You were given almost the entire chip (except PM), programming model, and you are still unsatisfied.
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostVendors have two choices -- offer a range of price/functionality options to let people choose which they want, or sell a single SKU with all functionality at a price somewhere in the middle, ie for more than the lowest price option today.
If the firmware is in ROM and drivers are free, then it is a level playing field between manufacturer and customer. If firmware is in writeable memory and one or both of them are not free, then the customer is at the manufacturer's whim.
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Originally posted by przemoli View PostEg. in EU you can run OSX on any hardware you like even though its license forbid it.
Maybe it was the fact they were reselling them or something, but it's not like you can just say the EU is a magic safe zone where everything is ok.
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostThat's what we do... pro drivers run on pro hardware, and consumer drivers run on consumer hardware.
If the above assumption is correct then the question becomes... Is AMD correct that firmware is hardware or is firmware actually software. Then other questions obviously follow.... Does it matter? If the firmware is able to expose functionality that the driver can choose to implement or not choose to implement then does it really matter if it is considered hardware or software?
EDIT: My opinion is that firmware is kind of neither. It isnt hardware and it isnt software. Its something in the middle that allow software to interface with hardware. If AMD wants to use firmware to expose features that the OSS drivers can use then so be it. I personally don't see anything wrong with it. Without the firmware that has been made for the OSS drivers I don't thing we would have the feature set we have today. If the OSS drivers had to bang on all hardware directly we would still be struggling with modesetting.
I thought radeonhd already taught us that lesson. I think we can all remember what happened when radeon used AtomBIOS and radeonhd resisted it. Firmware is obviously the way to go.Last edited by duby229; 08 April 2013, 11:17 PM.
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Originally posted by benmoran View PostThe bottom line in my eyes is that the "hardware" is the same. I understand that there are R&D and a billion other costs that need to be covered, and hardware manufacturers have long since used the practice of gimped drivers or firmware to artificially limit hardware features. AMD is not alone in this - lots of hardware manufacturers do it. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean that people in the Free software community will find it acceptible.
Originally posted by benmoran View PostNo, it's most definitely still a slimy business practice. In economic terms, it's a type of price discrimitation isn't it?
Is there something like Godwin's law for car analogies on computer forums ?Last edited by bridgman; 08 April 2013, 08:37 PM.
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostBut it's all OK if the firmware is stored in ROM rather than RAM ?
The bottom line in my eyes is that the "hardware" is the same. I understand that there are R&D and a billion other costs that need to be covered, and hardware manufacturers have long since used the practice of gimped drivers or firmware to artificially limit hardware features. AMD is not alone in this - lots of hardware manufacturers do it. But that doesn't make it right, and it doesn't mean that people in the Free software community will find it acceptible.
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Originally posted by bridgman View PostIsn't that the same as saying "a lot of people would be pretty pissed that they couldn't ignore the demo EULA on a piece of software and just keep using it without paying" ?
Vendors have two choices -- offer a range of price/functionality options to let people choose which they want, or sell a single SKU with all functionality at a price somewhere in the middle, ie for more than the lowest price option today.
And now you're trying to switch my thought experiment from a physical button back into a piece of software, when i specifically noted up front that it was interesting to think about it purely from a hardware perspective. It's illuminating that you instantly want to try and make it a software issue again, when it comes to artificially limiting functionality. I wonder why that is, exactly. Maybe it just seems more like an IP issue than a "i bought a physical item and can't use it" issue then?
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