OT: nVidia driver [was: Wish list] -- nVidia doesn't own a lot of the IP

[Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

From: Denis Leroy <denis at poolshark.org>
> Yup that's likely, and if they opened the code, we'd still have our
> hands tied like with the MP3 code.
> OTOH, there's a trend lately of companies "pledging" their patents to
> the Open Source community (Nokia, CA, IBM...). Would it help if Nvidia
> did the same ?

The problem is that you assume nVidia actually _owns_ the IP.
They do _not_.  ATI is in the same boat, that's why they are now
doing a unified driver.  Matrox has been the same as well.

nVidia, Matrox and others have gotten themselves in some messy
legal issues for code release in the past.  So either you create an
independent, "clean room" version, or you're at the mercy of the
IP holders.

I see the first major IP battle in the 3D space.  And companies like
nVidia, SGI and Sun will be our allies against the biggest IP leech
of them all in the OpenGL space ...

Microsoft.

I don't think people realize how much of an IP issue there really is
in this space.  And when you have companies that hold inter-twined
patents on all sorts of 3D concepts, it really matters little how
"clean room" the code is anyway.

3D is an IP landfield.


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org