The ati petition

[Dermot McGahon]

On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 03:10:52 -0400, Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com>  
wrote:

>>         It is not necessary to have full source code to the chips
>> themselves to write a driver, rather just a good description on how to
>> *access* the chip. (In case you don't know chips are designed using VHDL
>> or Verilog - programming languages, so designing a chip is somewhat
>> similar to writing a paper in TeX).
>
> Yup, often a single header file with comments is enough.  All you really
> need to know is what to write to what register to do what.  Of course
> most of my driver experience is with sound cards which are probably a
> good bit simpler.  But for most of the cards ALSA supports, you could
> write the driver starting with just the header file.

And this is where my mind starts to boggle!

Just how does this give the competitors an unfair advantage, as
opposed to higher profits for the graphics card manufacturer?


Dermot.
--