So why proprietary drivers for NVIDIA?

paroneayea · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Oct 2003 Posts: 87

Don't get me wrong... I understand this to the extent that this is all NVIDIA has released and that NVIDIA has not released information about the chipsets of their cards. But I'm wondering, why did they choose to do so? Would it really hurt them to release their drivers open source? It doesn't appear to have hurt ATI (to the degree that they have anyway).
Any thoughts?
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Malakin · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2004 1:04 am Post subject:

The common theory is that Nvidia has intellectual property from other companies in their drivers and therefore are unable to open them up. Whether this is true or not I have no idea.

Another theory is the obvious one that opening their drivers may give their competitors an advantage.

paroneayea · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Oct 2003 Posts: 87

I suppose this link would be relevant then... (story about NVIDIA's previous GPL violation)
Well, if NVIDIA did release it's drivers under the GPL, they wouldn't have to worry about infringing the GPL anymore. Of course, they'd get a lot of flak for having drivers that were already violating the GPL.... but I suppose they could get around that reasonably by saying "Well, we just discovered how much GPL code was in our drivers. We are sorry that this was the case, so we're going to release the whole thing under the GPL, since that would only be fair."
I don't think the OSS community (or if you're Richard Stallman, I suppose you'd insist Free Software community, since open source software represents different ideals than free software does) would put up much of a fuss. Rather, I think we'd be pleased.
I'm probably stating an obvious point here, but only one of two things can be true; that NVIDIA is violating the GPL or it isn't. Regardless of that, they still haven't released their software's source code in any form to the public, and yes, they must have a motive. Trade secret reasons are probably more likely than GPL violation... in fact, even if they are violating the GPL, I'd bet you anything that's not the reason they won't release their software under the GPL. They would have gotten much less flak if they just licensed their code under the GPL when the first GPL violation occurred.
Of course I could be wrong, and the refusal to do so might be the move of some pointy-haired boss. Or they might not have even had much discussion on the issue at all. Can't say I know... I don't work there :)
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Angrybob · Guru Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 575

well, certainly for their windows drivers they dedicate 90% of the code to specific hacks to make certain games get higher framerates in benchmarks so thats not something they really want people to see... not sure if thats really applicable for linux since its not really focused on the gaming side of things.

I guess most of all companies just dont like the idea of giving things away and not being in total control of their stuff...