Quote: Original post by MrMark
We are sliding off topic, but what the hey.

One thing I've always been curious about is the push to make only software, not hardware 'free and open source'. Why not hardware too ? You could build your own computer completely from scratch, optimize it for the task at hand, and learn how your system operates right down to the circuity - hardware raid controllers are far superior to software raid.

The problem with that idea is the little issue of most hardware these days is being produced as part of a multimillion dollar production system, which simply can't be easily reproduced on the small scale at home. It is far cheaper just to accept hardware as it is.

Now that said there are lots of options on things like programmable microcontrolers and the like, but they will never be quite the same as being able to 'customize' the i7 to your personal liking. Not to mention that most people who have the education and experience to really make an impact in chip design are likely those who are working in chip design.

Quote: One thing I've always been curious about is the push to make only software, not hardware 'free and open source'. Why not hardware too ?

Software is inherently more hackable (At least currently, who knows what the future might hold [grin]), if you have a computer and an internet connection you can get hold of all of the tools and information you need to build whatever you want. If I'm interested in OS development I can easily download the Linux kernel and play around with it to my heart's content. If I'm interested in a proprietary OS I can still utilise kernel debuggers, disassemblers and other such tools to mess around with it.

Hardware is different, I can't hack around with an Intel CPU the same way I can hack around with Windows without millions of pounds worth of specialised equipment which needs significant skill and experience to operate. Even if Intel suddenly released all of its designs and documentation to the general public altering a design and then actually using it is expensive and difficult (Unlike with the linux kernel where all I need to do is to be able to type 'make bzImage' and wait).

Hardware also has a higher barrier of entry. There's a lot less in the way of free tools and you're going to need to have some actual hardware to test. FPGAs can be used as prototyping platforms but even the cheapest dev boards are around £50 while most that could be used for some decent prototyping work are several thousand. ASIC production, even in prototyping quantities is very expensive, requires complex proprietary software and you can only get one chance to get it right.

That said open hardware does exist, Opencores is a site that provides open IP. There's also the Open Graphics Project attempted to build an open source graphics card, however it seems to have been around for ages and little progress has been made.

Quote: Original post by Talroth

Quote: Original post by MrMark
We are sliding off topic, but what the hey.

One thing I've always been curious about is the push to make only software, not hardware 'free and open source'. Why not hardware too ? You could build your own computer completely from scratch, optimize it for the task at hand, and learn how your system operates right down to the circuity - hardware raid controllers are far superior to software raid.

The problem with that idea is the little issue of most hardware these days is being produced as part of a multimillion dollar production system, which simply can't be easily reproduced on the small scale at home. It is far cheaper just to accept hardware as it is.

Now that said there are lots of options on things like programmable microcontrolers and the like, but they will never be quite the same as being able to 'customize' the i7 to your personal liking. Not to mention that most people who have the education and experience to really make an impact in chip design are likely those who are working in chip design.

And, as said, there is not only one extreme, but actually two, and a continuum between those two. And of course, there are also open source software developers who don't belong to that continuum at all.

Or put in short: People generally have different opinions on different things (for other reasons, see Monder's).

phresnel, did you quote the post you wanted? Because I'm not seeing the link between what you are talking about with software developers and opensource hardware.

Quote: Original post by Talroth
phresnel, did you quote the post you wanted? Because I'm not seeing the link between what you are talking about with software developers and opensource hardware.

The link is "Why not hardware too ?", then your answer, then me adding to your answer that people often just have different opinions (should be free/proprietary) on different things (software/hardware).

Sorry if I confused you ;)

Rereading my posts from yesterday, they do seem a bit heated. Oh well, no offense meant to anyone. In my defense, he did mention my pet peeve hate target, RMS ;)

Who would've believed that I myself used to be an avid FSF fan years ago :)

Quote: Original post by Prefect
Please take a step back and realize that this (the "ethical" part) is an opinion. That they have no legal obligation is a fact. That they have no ethical obligation is an opinion. I am not arguing that Your Opinion Is Wrong or anything crazy like that, but I would like you to acknowledge that it really is just an opinion, not fact.

I think that this is more than just an opinion. It's the basis a very large sector of our global economy resides on. Consider it this way. Millions of jobs depend on the respect of intellectual property rights, and behind each of these jobs is a human being who needs his salary to live, feed a family, pay his loans, and whatnot. Simply put, his entire life depends on it. In contrast, there are very few people who actually live of open source. The latter is more often a hobby than anything else.

Opening a piece of software is a major business risk. You risk of exposing secrets you don't want the competition to know. In the currently bad economic climate, and with countries like China behind their backs, this risk is even higher for a company to take. Exposing such secrets could lead to losses, which lead to layoffs, and which ultimately even lead to the bankruptcy of a company.

So, would you consider risking the jobs of many people who actually depend on them only so that a bunch of ideologists can feel 'free' an ethical thing to do ? I certainly don't. The FSF crowd might be entitled to their opinion, but fact is that a) in the grand scheme of things they're a small minority, and b) their ideals are diametrically opposed to how the global software economy works.

So let me reiterate again: people working in closed source do it for money. Money they need to live. And that money very often depends on closed source staying closed. The FSF crowd are mostly hobbyists. Most of them don't even know what it means to earn your money by making software. So unless they find a working alternative economic model that can feed the millions closed source software does, they have no business in demanding anything and/or labeling their ways as the only 'ethical' ones.

Quote: Original post by Prefect
The rest of your argument here is completely ridiculous. You don't seem to understand that people with ideals can be pragmatic, too.

A pragmatist would not even ask for an open driver. He wouldn't care about open or closed, neither for a driver nor for an OS. If it works, it's good. An FSF ideologist is anything but a pragmatist. And don't confuse an ideal with an ideology. For me, and many other people, the FSF 'ideal' is a nightmare.

But in the end, I realize I will never change your guys opinion, and you will never change mine. Whatever floats your boat. As long as the FSF/GNU/RMS don't impact us closed source people more than just in some heated discussion on the intarwebs, so what :)

Quote: Original post by Yann L
Rereading my posts from yesterday, they do seem a bit heated. Oh well, no offense meant to anyone. In my defense, he did mention my pet peeve hate target, RMS ;)

Who would've believed that I myself used to be an avid FSF fan years ago :)

People can change, and that's a good thing :)

Quote:

Quote: Original post by Prefect
Please take a step back and realize that this (the "ethical" part) is an opinion. That they have no legal obligation is a fact. That they have no ethical obligation is an opinion. I am not arguing that Your Opinion Is Wrong or anything crazy like that, but I would like you to acknowledge that it really is just an opinion, not fact.

I think that this is more than just an opinion. ... snip ...

Well, it is the opinion of the current political mainstream. But keep in mind that every mainstream starts out at the fringe and usually returns there eventually. The current mainstream (which is probably best described as neoliberal, even though that term has been quite overloaded [1]) is very roughly based on the idea that property rights are absolute, and that holding the needs of the few above the needs of the many is an acceptable, even desirable, foundation for decision making.

This system of thinking has its roots maybe a hundred, maybe 150 years ago. In the grand scheme of things, that's not much.

Perhaps the best concrete example that this current mainstream is a relatively new development is the development of copyright law, which I'm sure you're familiar with. The idea that intellectual property rights are absolute, even natural rights, is very recent.

[1] About "neoliberal": For example, Wikipedia quite rightly states that the term is used by the left to attack neoliberal programs, but it doesn't really suggest an alternative, more neutral term (I do believe there is a significant difference between economic liberalism and neoliberalism). I believe that there is an interesting story in this about etymology, belief systems, religion, and how language shapes our thinking and vice versa, but this post is long enough already.

Quote:
... discussion of the risk in opening software ...

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that a language like Lisp, or computing environments like Squeak would have won the "system wars". Then closed source would be de facto non-existing today. Businesses would still have found a way to commercialize software. Don't underestimate the power of a free market.

So obviously open sourcing causes upset with existing business strategies, and obviously that causes a lot of attacks against open source by incumbents. However, that doesn't mean that other systems can't work. Democracy also caused a lot of upset when it was introduced ;)

[Obviously, I don't think democracy and open source are at the same level. I apologize for exaggerating to illustrate my point...]

Quote:
So, would you consider risking the jobs of many people who actually depend on them only so that a bunch of ideologists can feel 'free' an ethical thing to do ? ... and so on ...

This is kind of tangential to this whole post, but as far as the original question of whether companies like AMD and NVidia have an ethical obligation to open the source to their drivers is concerned, my personal opinion is that it's not as clear cut as either you or the "FSF side" make it out to be.

Now: This may sound cruel, but I truly believe that it is a bad idea to base a decision in this question (regarding any political question, in fact) on what it will do to the jobs of the people working at these companies. There is always somebody's job at stake, so yeah, the cry for job security is very catchy, but it's not actually that productive and doesn't necessarily lead to good solutions.

Instead, a decision should be based on what is good for society as a whole. If this decision then leads to the loss of some driver developer's job, then that's tough, but it should be an acceptable loss. Professional driver developers are smart people; they should be able to find a job somewhere else.

So, what is good for society as a whole?

My own experience with drivers as a hobbyist tells me that a lot of the competition in the high-end graphics arena is decided on driver merits. Therefore, it seems sound to let vendors develop closed source drivers. (I don't buy the argument about keeping the hardware level documentation closed, though.)

On the other hand, vendors phase out support for older cards. This can prevent users from upgrading the software on their older systems, which is an obvious bad thing that could be easily prevented. I don't believe that vendors have an ethical obligation to support older products forever, but they do have an obligation to release the source code for the corresponding drivers when they end their support. That way, those who are still dependent on or interested in such drivers can carry on the torch, so to speak.

Of course there are some practical problems with this, since at the time support for a card is phased out, vendors really don't want to think at all about those cards anymore. This could be fixed with a kind of public escrow system, though. There are even precedents (the arrangement to have Qt automatically released under a BSD-style license should Trolltech or their successor stop development comes to mind).

Quote:

Quote: Original post by Prefect
The rest of your argument here is completely ridiculous. You don't seem to understand that people with ideals can be pragmatic, too.

A pragmatist would not even ask for an open driver. He wouldn't care about open or closed, neither for a driver nor for an OS. If it works, it's good. An FSF ideologist is anything but a pragmatist. And don't confuse an ideal with an ideology.

I'm sorry I obviously haven't made myself clear enough. There are people who want a world in which information about how software and hardware work is entirely open. This is an ideal of theirs (and no, I don't think I confuse ideal with ideology).

However, of course these same people see the facts of the world around them, which is that they can use a system where every piece of software except the graphics driver (and the BIOS) is open source, but every piece of hardware except for the interfaces is closed.

Clearly it is much easier to achieve a fully open source software world than opening up the hardware, so that is where attention is focused. That's what I mean by pragmatism: Having a goal, but accepting that reaching this goal is an uphill battle, and thus focussing on a partial goal as a stepping stone while the final goal seems out of immediate reach.

So these people are not necessarily inconsistent (they might be, but using closed hardware is not proof of inconsistency), they're just following a sound strategy.

[Edited by - Prefect on March 16, 2010 7:50:00 PM]

Quote: Original post by Yann L
A pragmatist would not even ask for an open driver. He wouldn't care about open or closed, neither for a driver nor for an OS. If it works, it's good. An FSF ideologist is anything but a pragmatist. And don't confuse an ideal with an ideology. For me, and many other people, the FSF 'ideal' is a nightmare.

There are two things that i really need to be open, drivers and fileformats, i accept hardware that has better proprietary drivers (If some things has to be kept secret then so be it) and i don't have a problem with software that handles undocumented fileformats as long as the hardware has a decent enough open driver and the software can export ALL my data to a properly documented format.

Case in point, my laptop with a radeon mobility x1300 , not a very old card but allready dropped from ATIs proprietary Linux driver (it got dropped roughly 12 months ago) and the opensource driver is too slow to be usable.

and secondly the wireless card i had in my Windows machine before i upgraded it to Vista, no ability to run unsigned drivers in Vista and no Vista driver for the card, (opensource Linux driver exists for the card so it found a new life in another machine while i bought a new card for my Vista rig)

While graphicscards is a minor issue (most people keep the OS their machine shipped with) peripherals is a fairly huge one, you don't want to replace a perfectly working printer, scanner, webcamera, or similar just because the vendor decided that it was better if you bought a new one for your new computer, you cannot possibly know what OS you will be using 20 years from now but it is quite likely that it won't be driver compatible with whatever you're using today. (Alot of businesses still run 20 year old Laserjets, while those did get updated proprietary drivers for Vista/Win7 most 20 year old hardware didn't get that kind of service (and HP has excellent open drivers for most of their printers aswell, so those laserjets will probably stick around until it becomes cheaper to replace them than to keep them running))