Denis Leroy <denis(a)poolshark.org> wrote:
Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> There probably are patents involved, but those don't in general prevent
> open sourcing something unless you're on the wrong end of the stick.
Yup that's likely, and if they opened the code, we'd still
have our
hands tied like with the MP3 code.
Maybe.
OTOH, there's a trend lately of companies "pledging"
their patents to
the Open Source community (Nokia, CA, IBM...). Would it help if Nvidia
did the same ?
What if nVidia just /licensed/ the patents for use with their cards, not
for /distributing source/? They may very well not even be their own. And
there might also be "trade secrets" in there.
OTOH, a friend of mine got to write a driver under NDA for the specs of the
device and protocols to talk to it... which he claims aren't all that
earth-shaking. But they came in form of photocopies of hastily printed
pages with handwritten amendments and additions. His take is that they'd be
ashamed to show the specs ;-)
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