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I would not say that is a fundamental reason. They have been willing to do it when the proper incentives are there. The incentive to keeping it closed source is

I would not say that is a fundamental reason. They have been willing to do it when the proper incentives are there. The incentive to keeping it closed source is primarily part of a strategy to sabotage their competitors, which I hope is not a behavior that anyone here is complicit in. Please don't work for hardware companies that do this, there are plenty of companies out there that know how to spend their money in other ways. >Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers? Neither of those are good options because even in the second case, there are still vast swaths of code that upstream is not going to touch out of fear of breaking things, the end result being that you still get stuck with unfixable kernel and driver bugs. >The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus. The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like.

dontblink 6y ago
That is an assumption. I think the simpler case is it's more work and exposes potential security vulnerabilities they don't care to patch or maintain. Function > all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fluffy87 6y ago
This claim is wrong. It’s not about sabotaging competitors, it’s about being afraid that your competitors would steal your IP they gives you an advantage. Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified. If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different. But you can’t prevent somebody from reading even GPL code, being “inspired” by it, and writing something different enough that does the same thing with the same ideas. Like just look at the LLVM project were people look at what GCC code does every now and then for “inspiration”.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified. If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different. Intel's GPU drivers are free software, they even contribute them themselves, same goes for AMD. I think NVIDIA's different because they have the Apple mentality of them being the real innovators, (regardless of fact) and building their internal culture on secrecy, closeness even to other teams within the company etc. I think they consider it as part of their 'coolness factor', together with the CEO being on stage dressed like a rock star from the 80s. The fact that they benefit from Linux massively and that having an open driver would win them massive goodwill is not directly measurable in terms of their balance sheet, at least in the short term, plus it would remove some of the secrecy.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    They do so by using different teams, and their open source variants always lag behind what their closed source drivers are capable of doing across Windows, Apple and game consoles.
    - AsyncAwait 6y ago
      The drivers are decent enough nonetheless. I think having an open driver done by a different team and maybe a bit less optimized is still preferable to not having an official open driver at all.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        I used to enjoy my OpenGL 4.1 driver on Radeon HD 6250, which was still short of OpenGL 4.4/DX 11 on Windows, but still quite ok I guess, all it does now with open source drivers is OpenGL 3.3. So no that isn't decent enough, and I only keep it like this, because it is just a little travel laptop that I keep on using until it eventually dies.
_ph_ 6y ago
The incentive to keeping it closed source is primarily part of a strategy to sabotage their competitors, which I hope is not a behavior that anyone here is complicit in. I can't figure out what you mean by "sabotage their competitors". The term sabotage indicates that they are performing actions to actively harm their competitors, how is that related to keeping your source, which cointains your IP, private? The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like. It is nice to hear that they are welcome :p. Which they would even feel more so, if there were actual incentives being offered rather than trying to make their life artificial difficult.

dontblink 6y ago

That is an assumption. I think the simpler case is it's more work and exposes potential security vulnerabilities they don't care to patch or maintain. Function > all.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fluffy87 6y ago

This claim is wrong. It’s not about sabotaging competitors, it’s about being afraid that your competitors would steal your IP they gives you an advantage. Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified. If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different. But you can’t prevent somebody from reading even GPL code, being “inspired” by it, and writing something different enough that does the same thing with the same ideas. Like just look at the LLVM project were people look at what GCC code does every now and then for “inspiration”.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified. If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different. Intel's GPU drivers are free software, they even contribute them themselves, same goes for AMD. I think NVIDIA's different because they have the Apple mentality of them being the real innovators, (regardless of fact) and building their internal culture on secrecy, closeness even to other teams within the company etc. I think they consider it as part of their 'coolness factor', together with the CEO being on stage dressed like a rock star from the 80s. The fact that they benefit from Linux massively and that having an open driver would win them massive goodwill is not directly measurable in terms of their balance sheet, at least in the short term, plus it would remove some of the secrecy.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  They do so by using different teams, and their open source variants always lag behind what their closed source drivers are capable of doing across Windows, Apple and game consoles.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    The drivers are decent enough nonetheless. I think having an open driver done by a different team and maybe a bit less optimized is still preferable to not having an official open driver at all.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      I used to enjoy my OpenGL 4.1 driver on Radeon HD 6250, which was still short of OpenGL 4.4/DX 11 on Windows, but still quite ok I guess, all it does now with open source drivers is OpenGL 3.3. So no that isn't decent enough, and I only keep it like this, because it is just a little travel laptop that I keep on using until it eventually dies.

_ph_ 6y ago

The incentive to keeping it closed source is primarily part of a strategy to sabotage their competitors, which I hope is not a behavior that anyone here is complicit in. I can't figure out what you mean by "sabotage their competitors". The term sabotage indicates that they are performing actions to actively harm their competitors, how is that related to keeping your source, which cointains your IP, private? The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like. It is nice to hear that they are welcome :p. Which they would even feel more so, if there were actual incentives being offered rather than trying to make their life artificial difficult.