Nvidia Wants to Remove Some GPL From Linux Kernel Code

[beachbod]

Based on nvidias track record with physx they probably bribed Robert Morell.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]antilycus[/nom]it's not really that simple. NVIDIA has been a pioneer and has spent BILLIONS of dollars making sure that they have the best drivers on the market....and they do. They CRUSH AMD/ATi, Intel, Matrox, SGI etc. Nvidias bread winner is in their driver code. Their hardware is easy to copy (as that's the way to the world works no, nvidia spends the billions to produce it, everyone else just copies it), the software/drivers are the proprietary bread winner for nvidia. I don't know if _GPL would give up trade secrets or not, but not everything can run for free.[/citation]

Single GPU, AMD is no worse than Nvidia in drivers. Multi-GPU, AMD is only slightly worse. Are you going to actually use facts in your argument?

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]alidan[/nom]if the drivers go open, wouldnt you be able to code a work around to get cuda and physx up and going on an amd card?[/citation]

PhysX and CUDA need a mix of driver and hardware support to run properly AFAIK and even if they didn't, simply having them be proprietary modules within the more or less otherwise open-source driver set would solve that issue anyway.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]claber[/nom]I'm impressed that Toms readers do not seem to know how nVidia and ATi work. Their driver teams have more engineers that the hardware teams. The drivers are a central piece of their product.Drivers contain: 3rd party licensed IP and trade secrets such as details on how the architecture works, as well as algorithms.Look at the games: drivers update can boost a game's performance significantly (not SLI). Just updating the driver, using the same card. It is a good example of how important the driver is.Another example: Quadro vs GeForce vs Tesla: virtually the same hardware, but the cost difference is due to the work needed to get the drivers developed.Graphics cards are much more about the driver then the hardware.[/citation]

It's not that simple anymore. There are more differences than just drivers between Quadro cards, Tesla cards, and Geforce cards with the current generations and even if there wasn't, it's not like Nvidia is being asked of make open-source versions of the Tesla/Quadro drivers, just the Geforce drivers.

 

[jardows]

Hey, Tom's! This was posted back in February on other sites! Why is it just now being published as a news article here?

 

[blazorthon]

Hey, Tom's! This was posted back in February on other sites! Why is it just now being published as a news article here?

Without checking yet, I'd assume that Tom's covered this now because there was something new to talk about with this subject, but Tom's might simply have been incredibly late if your right about that time frame.