Franc said:
I don't. In fact I don't understand why IC/chipset manufacturers don't
release the full documentation for their designs. What's the point of
designing something that only the select few manufacturers are privy
to? It seems to me that a product would gain maximum market
penetration if the wider technical community were able to apply their
collective skills to developing it. And these skills would often be
provided at no cost to the manufacturer.
If the intent is to protect their IP, then I would counter by saying
that their IP is probably already in the hands of their competitors,
so nothing is gained, only lost.
Back in the 80's, the hardware interfaces of all peripherals were
documented, manufacturers went out of their way to document them,
because it guaranteed wide usage of their products. This applied to
video cards as well. Back then nobody thought that documenting these
things would lead to their competitors learning the internal secrets of
how their hardware worked. Of course they did this because the BIOS was
one-step-removed from useless. The BIOS in those days was supposed to
act like device drivers do nowadays, but it never worked out that way.
I think the current paranoia about revealing patents came from some
overzealous marketing on the part of these two companies. They started
bragging about super-secret technologies that the other one did not
have, and they backed it up by blanking out the documentation. Now it's
just the de facto norm in the GPU industry to keep it all secret
whether it's needed or not.
Yousuf Khan
