Why graphics drivers are proprietary

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday, 2. October 2012. 15.14.59 Junayeed Ahnaf wrote:
> The header is self explanatory. I always wonder what bad would it bring to
> the vendor if they open source their graphics driver?  Thoughts?

AFAIK:

* Some details of the internal design of the graphics chip can be reverse-
engineered much more easily by the competitor company, if the driver source is 
available up-front.

* There may also be copyright&patent issues of the source code that prevent it 
from becoming open source, even if the company wanted to release it.

This is pretty obvious for both nVidia and ATI, which keep the drivers closed-
source, in contrast to Intel, which has open drivers but generally inferior 
hardware design. nVidia and ATI have nothing serious to learn from Intel's 
design, so to speak. ATI eventually provides the chip specs for the previous-
generation chips, which are old enough to be not relevant for their current 
products (and they release the specs, not the source code itself, I guess due 
to copyright issues).

HTH, :-)
Marko