On Mon, 6 May 2002, Billy Biggs wrote: > ATI has been willing to give Linux developers specs under NDA, and > that has resulted in the development drivers that exist for many of > their newer products. Development is rather slow, but I don't think > that if the specs were public it would speed up all that much. The > problem is the lack of money. Ideally, ATI would write their own > drivers (and I heard this is what they are going to do, at least for 3D > support). > They really did it. Oyvind AA. was the first one to have access to code samples using the NDA. But even prior to this his code was already working (something like 0.20 release). After the NDA the code was vastly improved. Exception still is the ImpacTV chipset. Later on Imnsonia, Lupien, Vladimir, Octavian and many others joined contributing lots of time, code and effort resulting in the old GATOS package (not in this order of course). I really enjoy ATI hardware. Really good chipsets. And really good set of bundled applications. Their "fine-tune" apps are really good. IMHO making engineering docs 'public' is a matter of good engineering practice. Must put aside this paranoid competitive thing. In other words: - I can only trust what is fully disclosured. Nothing to hide. Good products are the ones with wide open support/practices. Security by obscurity is no security at all. What is the point of making schematics or code snapshots not public? I would risk the guess of something to hide. Really hidden. No excuses or controversies here. The complexity of all these subjects make "public" a word very misplaced. The effective use of such "public specifications/schematics/code" is really bounded to a very small specific set of groups. And for these groups, I am sure, this won't make much difference in terms of "piracy", "industry something" or other arguments. Besides the huge concentrated knowledge you kneed an enormous list of resources to piracy a chipset or even a great soft project. Competition must not intimidate good engineering practices. And at last, by being public, these things can always be detected. There are only benefits of "open policies". And only problems of closed ones. The worst case is always the "consumer" at the end of the chain which pay the product and suffer the "lockin" imposed by some nasty creatures on some positions of this model. As a last argument I will remember the ADOBE case. IMHO they've lost a very good opportunity to act with dignity by assuming their flaw file format and saying to their costumers: "- OK customers, we are selling a format that is not so "secure" as we say and that can be broken (as it was) but we will use this to enhance our product and make a better one." But what they did? You know what. By using the DMCA they arrested who pointed the problem altering the problem into piracy instead of assuming their fault of a weak product. They've lost several points with me. And these "closed" products always go the same way. I like ATI hardware but they've lost several points with me too and perhaps with others 'consumers/costumers'. Now I think twice before buying a piece of hardware/software... I try to see what is going on between the lines of the "agreements". I don't want a machine which I have absolutely no control over what is going on with my stuff. It's my stuff.... Just my $2. Abracos PCastro -- HOM: http://www.momentus.com.br/users/hook/ GPG: http://www.momentus.com.br/users/hook/GPG-PauloCastro.asc
