Closed vs. open development methods (Was DVI output, ATI or nVidia)

[Robin Laing]

Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 17:35 +0200, Walter Garcia-Fontes wrote:
>> It also escapes to me completely why a hardware producer would like to
>> have close-source drivers, since it does not sell software but
>> hardware. What does it gain? If the driver was open code, would it
>> loose any revenues? Is it giving any information to competing hardware
>> producers? 
> 
> Closed source doesn't stop copycats.  They can hook up logic analysers
> and see how the hardware works.  They can pull apart boards and work out
> the wiring and parts.  They can decompile software and firmware, to
> discover its operating principles.  They may not make a perfect clone,
> but they may have discovered all the tricks that the original
> manufacturer made, to make their own similar product that works just as
> well, or even better.
> 
> Just about all electronic devices are open source, so to speak.  There's
> nothing really secret about how a television set works, even a
> particular model.  Likewise for a personal stereo system, or a telephone
> exchange.  Yet none of those devices have their sales killed.  They even
> benefit from being able to check on each other, and avoid dumb ideas.
> 
> All closed source does it make it more difficult for someone to work on
> without all the toys that I talked about in the first paragraph.  I
> think the wealth of what can be done with open source on Linux, and
> other OSs, does demonstrate why it's good.
> 
But doing this takes time and allows a company some time to market their 
product and make some money from it.

Of course if you reverse engineer a product, you could open yourself to 
legal headaches in the USA due to the DMCA.

-- 
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Robin Laing