Lourens Veen wrote:
On Monday 14 August 2006 15:40, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
<SNIP>
Currently the documentation isn't published because it would
contain trade secrets; it really is that simple.
Whose trade secrets? Surely ATI (or whomever) decides whether
something only they know should be kept a trade secret or not.
Yes, and so far they have been unwilling to make them available in the
way that Epson has. With nVidia, it is common knowledge (perhaps due to
XF86 reverse engineering efforts) that their first products had a closed
driver because most of the acceleration was in the driver.
As for outside trade secrets, what are they?
Well, since they are secrets, we don't know. But it is common for
proprietary software to contain trade secrets licensed from other companies.
Macrovision copy protection on TV-out is a well-known example, but
what else? What functionality is in that binary blob the Intel
drivers have?
After doing more research on Google. It appears that the first source I
read had it wrong. The file: "intel_hal.so" is not a generalized HAL
but rather something else which is not needed for normal operation of
the driver. KP says that it is for Macrovision and that it currently
isn't being distributed. This would mean that Intel did provide
complete documentation for the GPU to the team that wrote the open
source driver (however many of them are Intel employees).
Still, what I said about the Epson drivers and the fact that a company
*can* do it that way is true.
--
JRT
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