Sony Continues Tuning AMD Jaguar Support Within The LLVM Clang Compiler

[L_A_G]

On the other side,.. Is it good, if some company invests many months into development of product with software, and then different pure HW company just copies the product design and ships open-source software, which was developed and fine-tuned for months?

You're again missing the point here... When a company using the work of others and refuses to contribute anything back to the only one benefiting from it is that company. Any success they have is going to be success other companies, potentially less selfish ones who may actually contribute something back, could have instead.

Your logic only really works if said company is a monopoly or close to one.

Sometimes it's not about contributing back, but about not having to worry about legal ramifications with test releases, etc. Take Sony, they could tweak something and release an updated version of their OS or drivers, realize that didn't work for a few games because they were in a hurry, revert it on their next update, and then re-implement it better a few releases down the line when it finally works correctly everywhere and they're in a state to actually share their changes with everyone...but they can't actually do that with the GPL projects without risking GPL violations.

You do realize that you don't have to release the source code immediately? You can absolutely withhold releasing the source code until you've debugged and/or cleaned it up for public consumption. The GPL only states that you do have to release it when asked to, not that you have to make your internal git repo available to the public or something.

[M@yeulC]

On the other side,.. Is it good, if some company invests many months into development of product with software, and then different pure HW company just copies the product design and ships open-source software, which was developed and fine-tuned for months?

This mandatory open-source requirement for changes cuts both ways... Sometimes, it makes it easier for competitors to clone product with need to do research and development,. That would undermine prices, which generate profit from products sold, by company doing R&D, and that profit is also used for future R&D,... without money for R&D, there will be no more advancement... There are lots of scam companies, which cut-off costs of R&D, because they just steal designs. And, forced FOSS would allow them to do it completely legally.

So, that's why I'm biased towards FOSS platforms, allowing freedom of companies to protect their specific R&D, and generate funds for future R&D.

In the end, many companies won't put product into such risk,.. So, they would develop everything from scratch, to not be limited by GPL, which is horrible for ecosystem completely... So, having shared common base platform, which doesn't require open-sourcing changes is much better for eco-system.

Yeah, but if someone bigger "steals" your GPL-licensed code, at least you can get their improvements back.

Now, if they don't make any improvements... At least, you get more users, in some cases (/contributors, if the hardware isn't locked down, which GPLv3 enforces).

But yeah, the case which sucks is if your company puts a lot of effort into a product, then someone comes along, rips off the product and captures the market, to let the original company die. That use-case is on the mind of everyone, especially those who fear the GPL. I'm not sure it has ever happened, though? Hopefully, in such a case, the company that rips-off should better realise that they're killing the golden goose.

It would be a great thing if companies were more geared towards fulfiling a consumer's need. A rival company takes our product and make it cheaper, more accessible? That should be a good thing! Unfortunately that doesn't pay development costs, so that strategy is mostly used by hobbyists (see: transistor tester, for instance).

However, when it isn't your core business, better adopt a GPL-like license if you can. Your goal it to make everything but your core business a commodity. I think that's the biggest driver in commercial open-source developments.

Maybe what I'm looking for is a BSD-like license with anti-tivoization clauses? That would be miles ahead of regular BSD/MIT/Apache for the consumer

[slacka]

I'm glad to see Sony stepping up here to improve Zen CPU support. AMD's been putting all their ZEN improvements in the proprietary AOCC and not upstreaming them. Grepping through the LLVM source tree everything from @amd.com is related to GPUs, [AMDGPU] with just some bare minimum Zen 2 enablement.

Why AMD is doing this?

[edenist]

At least they're contributing back to the community rather than using open source as something they can use, but don't have to contribute a cent or line of code back to even when licenses say they have to.

While I'm certainly not one to look a gift horse in the mouth [it's great they are contributing their optimisations upstream with LLVM], I really wish they would do the same with freeBSD as well.

Maybe the answer is that there isn't much to contribute back that doesn't make up core, PS4-specific functionality? That I could understand, but at the very least I feel it would be polite to provide some financial support to the project, seeing how large of a component it makes up of their core products.

[DavidKL]

Speaking of toxicity... Sony argued in court that only a few bad apples, aka nobodies, would want to use Linux on PS3. Funny how Sony itself used Linux support to market the PS3.

Paraphrase from memory: "Nobody wants to use Linux on PS3 so the plaintiffs are bad people who want to cause trouble without justification."

[Guest]

Yeah, but if someone bigger "steals" your GPL-licensed code, at least you can get their improvements back.

Now, if they don't make any improvements... At least, you get more users, in some cases (/contributors, if the hardware isn't locked down, which GPLv3 enforces).

Well, the someone bigger is manufacturing company, which manufactures product in cheaper way, because of better "contacts" and "political-relations", than small company has got,... Then, initial R&D costs wouldn't get ever paid back,.. Could ruin small companies,.. So, in such case, it's better to release source-code after some time after product launch,...

But yeah, the case which sucks is if your company puts a lot of effort into a product, then someone comes along, rips off the product and captures the market, to let the original company die. That use-case is on the mind of everyone, especially those who fear the GPL. I'm not sure it has ever happened, though? Hopefully, in such a case, the company that rips-off should better realise that they're killing the golden goose.

Big companies do not care,... they have already established marketing for dummy consumers, and they just like to ruin small competitors, therefore ruining diversity, and that would keep their monopoly running.

It would be a great thing if companies were more geared towards fulfiling a consumer's need. A rival company takes our product and make it cheaper, more accessible? That should be a good thing! Unfortunately that doesn't pay development costs, so that strategy is mostly used by hobbyists (see: transistor tester, for instance).

What are customer needs? What you described sounds more like customer "wishes". Majority of people don't even think about tinkering with their hardware,... And, few hobbyist wish they could do it,... However, for hobbyist, there are always evaluation boards, and other alternatives,...

However, when it isn't your core business, better adopt a GPL-like license if you can. Your goal it to make everything but your core business a commodity. I think that's the biggest driver in commercial open-source developments.

That would apply to established big companies,.. Not to small companies.

Maybe what I'm looking for is a BSD-like license with anti-tivoization clauses? That would be miles ahead of regular BSD/MIT/Apache for the consumer

Honestly, as an end-user, I don't care much about tivotization,.. If device fulfills it's purpose, and advertised features, then I'm pretty much happy.

[Guest]

I'm glad to see Sony stepping up here to improve Zen CPU support. AMD's been putting all their ZEN improvements in the proprietary AOCC and not upstreaming them. Grepping through the LLVM source tree everything from @amd.com is related to GPUs, [AMDGPU] with just some bare minimum Zen 2 enablement.

Why AMD is doing this?

Dunno,.. maybe, because of some SLA guarantees for embedded and custom solutions? Or, some different "enterprise contract restrictions"?

[L_A_G]

While I'm certainly not one to look a gift horse in the mouth [it's great they are contributing their optimisations upstream with LLVM], I really wish they would do the same with freeBSD as well.

At the very least they could donate some reasonable fraction, say 10%, of the money they'd have spent had they done it all in-house. However with the way companies tend to be run by the people who can make them the most money, that's obviously not going to happen.

Maybe the answer is that there isn't much to contribute back that doesn't make up core, PS4-specific functionality? That I could understand, but at the very least I feel it would be polite to provide some financial support to the project, seeing how large of a component it makes up of their core products.

Yes, I suspect much of the reason why they've contributed so little back has to do with the changes either being very specific to their use cases or then tying to their proprietary APIs and services. Licensing out the very necessary development documentation at great cost to third party developers is after all one of the ways console manufacturers make money (on top of licensing fees for becoming an officially approved developer, vastly over-priced development tools, various certification fees to launch a game on their platform and then a per-copy licensing fee which IIRC is as much $20 per copy on full price titles).

Writing this and talking about how people rise to the top in corporate setting I came to realize that it's not completely unlike how the mafia used to work. The biggest earners ran the show and promotions were given based on how much money people brought in. Then in the 1980s the enforcers, i.e the ones who went out and killed people for the mafia, like John Gotti decided that they're should be in charge and basically just murdered their way to the top.

[xcom]

It means they are compiling the games for Jaguar with LLVM ?