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Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 19:28:18 -0500
From: Sergey Babkin <babkin@bellatlantic.net>
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To: David Preece <davep@afterswish.com>
Cc: Justin Wojdacki <justin@chiplogic.com>,
	freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs Linux, Solaris, and NT
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David Preece wrote:
> 
> A lot of the reason why 3dfx (rip), Nvidia et al. often feel they cannot
> release open source drivers is that a substantial proportion of what these
> products do takes place on the host processor. Large quantities of research
> go into the exact division of tasks between host processor and offload
> processor, hence a large amount of their competitive advantage is derived

They don't have to publish the source code of their firmware, if
they download it from the driver then a binary image of firmware
would do just fine.

> from the driver code. They cannot afford to release it. Furthermore, AGP
> represents a substantial bottleneck to them, the protocol by which they get
> information down it is also of great commercial significance. Asking for

Sorry for a stupid question but why would not they patent this 
protocol then ? For example, PostScript is patented by Adobe and
the only reason everyone is able to use it is that Adobe had
explicitly granted this right to the public.

-SB


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