Originally posted by GreatEmerald
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Also, you seemed to imply that it was Windows' fault that parts of the proprietary drivers are proprietary. That is not so. You are fully allowed to publish Free drivers for Windows, GPL'd even (keeping in mind that the GPL allows you to use non-Free APIs that are part of the core OS the GPL code is running on). More than one such driver exists, although they're very rare to see (and are rarely hardware drivers).
Almost any third-party code in their drivers is something voluntarily licensed, excepting maybe the support code for the following point.
The BIG item for the video drivers is the movie decode and DRM stuff that they must support in order to sell products to most consumers. If they accidentally open up those interfaces in the wrong way (.e.g, a way that allows the DRM to be bypassed) then they are going to get hosed from the folks they licensed the patents from and promised they'd keep the DRM lock tight. Since their hardware must support these DRM mechanics in order to be marketable to the larger consumer GPU market, and since those interfaces are apparently still partially protected by driver black magic and an assumption that nobody will figure out the hardware interface to the video decoder units, they are somewhat forced to avoid documenting said interfaces or publishing open code for them.
It may just be beneficial for someone to reverse engineer those and (re)illustrate the folly of security through obscurity, and either force the hardware vendors to move all the DRM protection entirely into the hardware, or (by some miracle) finally get everyone to give up on DRM altogether (good freaking luck).
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