Intel aims for open-source graphics advantage

This is some weird stuff from Margaret Lewis (AMD):

Quoting:"It is hard to speculate if open-source drivers can give a competitive advantage over Intel and Nvidia," she said. "Open-source drivers could help ease the difficulty of dealing with proprietary drivers with Linux. However, proprietary drivers often provide better optimizations or support more features. Having both types of drivers available gives customers a choice of which approach they want to take."

Uh... no? If you open source your proprietry driver then both will have the same optimixations/features. Unless you do dirty things inside your driver that you don't want the outside world to see ofcourse.

Also strange that the interviewer didn't pick this up.

My code was crashing a lot, but then I closed the source, and now it runs stable! Once, I missed a deadline, but boom, closed the source and it was finished! Thanks, AMD, for turning me on to the magic of closed source!

Here's to hoping your closed source ATI drivers one day aren't crap that crashes more boxes than Win 95.

sander -

She may just be mixing apples and oranges, confusing vendor-supported with community supported.

It is a legitimate question...if you free your driver, you put it at the mercy of the kernel guys. They will do things for the reasons they do things, which may not make sense for your hardware.

Think of something like gcc -- which has been roundly criticized over the years for its poor (but constantly improving) code generation/optimization relative to platform-specific compilers. They made a design decision to prefer multiple platform support over execution speed of the code.

Or, they could see something like the Reiser4 mess and be concerned that their developers will be tied up in knots over what seems like trivia.

At least, in theory.

Real life, however, says that the vendor can maintain the driver and kernel hackers will say "Thank you."

Real life also says that some of the "trivia" may be trivia, but most of it tends to make something that works better in Linux land.

Quoting:confusing vendor-supported with community supported

I'm not mixing that up, AMD and the interviewer are. The question was about "what if AMD open sources their drivers", not "what if the community develops their own open source drivers". If the current closed source drivers are opened then the features are identical, unless AMD removes parts that it's afraid to show the community. That's my point.

Sander: I don't think dino was referring to you, unless you're a woman. Of course, I may have missed something. :-)

dcparris -

Not to mention being a third persion woman!!!

Of course, it seems popular these days to refer to yourself in the third person...

Sorry. I'd swear I read "You may" instead of "She may"...

> Not to mention being a third persion woman!!!

I'm confused. Are you saying Sander is the 3rd persian woman you've known? :-D

...Ducking and running...

> ...Ducking and running...

All here remember that Don's Marine training has superbly prepared him for this...

hehe :-)