
Nvidia's “Open-Source Guy” Has Left the Company - infodroid
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Gnu-Leaves
======
tombert
I'm not asking this to troll, I'm genuinely confused...why are drivers ever
proprietary?

Aren't drivers inherently a loss-leader so that a company can sell hardware?
Why not always open up the drivers?

~~~
kyrra
My guesses:

1) Nvidia and AMD both do per-game optimizations in the drivers themselves.
Though my understand is that Nvidia has more resources dedicated to this. They
will send 1 or 2 people to the studios of AAA game devs nearer release to help
the company optimize their game plus to add "hacks" into their own drivers to
work around inefficiencies in those games.

If they opened sourced their drivers, that work would be made free to AMD and
other drivers.

2) "Benchmark Cheating". Graphics Drivers do lots of optimizations depending
on the specific application. I'd wager that this includes popular benchmark
apps.

3) Patent lawsuits. There are a massive number of patents around the graphics
word. Obscuring how a driver works probably helps protect them somewhat from
potential patent litigation.

~~~
orik
Here's a quote from another hn user robert_foss from the discussion on the
Apple / Imagination Technologies thread.

'In the GPU space it is impossible to not infringe on the IP of other vendors.

In fact it is the major reason GPU vendors give for not having an open source
driver. I have spoken to the CTO (Jem Davies) of ARM about the GPU drivers and
open sourcing them more than once. And every time I've gotten the reply: "No,
we can't, it opens us up to IP infringement suits."'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021299)

~~~
xorcist
Intel GPU drivers are completely open source, are they not?

That clearly makes it not impossible, if they cared enough.

~~~
kimixa
Both AMD's and Intel's OSS drivers are 'clean room' separate codebases to
their internal closed drivers. It may be that they are specifically avoiding
some features/rewriting possibly infringing code in these cases.

As far as I know, we have yet to have an open driver to get the same
performance as their closed windows ones in all cases. There may be reasons
behind that.

------
thomastjeffery
Maybe he sees AMDGPU as an opportunity.

Drivers should never be proprietary. There are no legitimate reasons for them
to be, only sad excuses.

~~~
eropple
_> There are no legitimate reasons for them to be, only sad excuses._

Are you an IP lawyer? I'm not, but I work with people who are, and they would
disagree with you _rather strongly_ with regard to certain cases and certain
fields. It's pretty presumptuous to tell people what legal risks they should
expose themselves to (and to forestall the tired and obvious, it's great that
Intel thinks that they're OK and can open their stuff--but I sure get why
others aren't so cavalier).

~~~
benchaney
"I'm breaking the law, but I don't want to get in trouble" is a sad excuse,
not a legitimate reason.

~~~
Qwertious
What if the laws are dumb and dangerously arbitrary? Like, say, patent laws.
To be fair, it's not so much "laws" as "things people can sue you over", but
that distinction doesn't become relevant until _after_ the lawsuit and large
amounts of money down the drain. And then they disappear without recouping
your costs, because they're a goddamn shell company.

It _is_ a sad excuse, but only because we live in a sad reality with massively
broken patent laws.

~~~
dTal
Which will never change as long as the major companies evade the issue like
this, while the smaller ones are crushed.

------
DArcMattr
At the very least, vendors should provide something like a data sheet with all
the register information a developer would need to write their own driver.
There's no need to give away the recipe to the special sauce.

------
alekratz
Surely there are more people who push for open source at Nvidia?

~~~
tomstockmail
Entirely. Phoronix just likes their clickbait and alarmist headlines.

~~~
ekianjo
Not sure why you were downvoted. Phoronix is all about clickbait headlines.

~~~
tomstockmail
Phoronix has quite the following, unfortunately. Luckily it's banned on
reddits /r/linux forum.

------
compuguy
Looks like phronix.com is down....

~~~
joecool1029
I didn't think HN was that much traffic... does Micheal not typically get more
than 20 people on the site?

~~~
JasonSage
HN is a _lot_ of traffic.

~~~
overcast
Max I ever saw was around 100 simultaneous connections on projects that jumped
up on the page. Not sure I would consider that a _lot_ for any reasonable
hardware.

~~~
ekianjo
I have seen up to 300 when you reach somewhere around the top of the page.
Still not huge, indeed.

~~~
0x6c6f6c
More likely to be that his websites code is _very_ unoptimized.

