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Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

My impression is that there are issues with 3rd party licensing of various sorts in the proprietary drivers that would prevent open sourcing them even if Nvidia/AMD wanted to.

Of course that probably doesn't prevent them from giving the OSS drivers some love, but that is another story.

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The genesis of this was back in 2006 when Microsoft started requiring graphics board/chip makers to keep some aspects of their design secret, to support DRM in Vista. That includes hardware details and code, i.e. open source drivers. See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

I'm actually quite glad that adequate drivers are available, even if they're not open source. That outcome wasn't guaranteed.

It goes further back than that. The software stack for all modern AMD GPUs is based on the original unified shader compiler for the first AMD unified shader GPU, Xenos (XBOX360) written largely by Microsoft. AMD just has a license to the code, MS still owns it.

Any sources for that software stack part? Only information I managed to find was that AMD was contracted to create Xenos core, but there was no mentions who made software (I would assume AMD) and especially no information about licensing.

nVidias argument for not opening up the Linux driver is that it shares a lot of code with the Windows driver. I'm not saying that this argument makes sense, but it's the one they use.

I don't understand why that prevents them from releasing the source? There's no reason the Windows driver need be closed-source.

That depends, how much of their competitive advantage over AMD is in software and how much of it is hardware?

Or at least documenting the hardware.

I might be waving hands here, but I got impression that actual components that do raw processing in GPU are not that complex. Complex part (and which produces the performance) is the pipeline feeding data into those units. GPUs are also programmable chips so even publishing driver that shows how graphic stack on GPU side is set up could potentially reveal whole architecture of that chip.

I thought their argument was that some non-trivial amount of code in their driver is licensed somehow and they're thus not free to open source it. It sharing code with the Windows driver is the explanation for how that code got into the Linux driver to begin with.

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