Hi Jon, Hi audience,
(I just got aware of that discussion because i got that mail CCed
trough a resend on a general discussion list about software patents.)
Even if ATI and nVidia, plus maybe even IBM, would sign a well written
and working agreement between them all, it would not stop anybody else
out there in the world that is holding patents from inspecting the unveiled
data and then looking for specific things that might work for pressing out
some Billion dollars from those companys. Patents do work, but they do
work mostly for the lawers income, and for companys that have the only
purpose for getting revenues from a "bought up" patent portfolio. Those
can be really nastys, even if you are Microsoft you dont like to pull out
some tons of code from your web browser just because someone else
is (really!) holding a patent for plugin technology like used for ActiveX.
BTW, did you know that the main study on SCO source in the Linux core
is from 1999, according to the SCO lawyers. Lets say it took two engineers
some two months for fiddeling out all those details in the 500.000 lines
where there were similarities to SCO code - then that was an effort of
some 30.000 USD - and according to SCO there was no bigger study
before that and no bigger study after that research. And now SCO is
reporting a 30.000.000 USD (thirty million) effort shedule for upcoming
lawyers work in the SCO vs. IBM case.
You dont want to go to court unless someone really forces you to do so.
You dont even want to do that despite you are as big as ATI or nVidia.
For such amounts you better want to hire some 300 high rank developers
rather than some 6 high paid lawyers with their full office staff - just to
stop others from charging you repeatedly with a per-chip-tax that sums
up to some 10 Million a year _per patent_ with options for up to back
propagation of charges for the previous 20 years. Much worser, as soon
as you have redesigned your chip desing to something else less performant
there is absolutely no guarantee that tomorrow there will be no other
person starting charging you once again and again for another topic.
You might now understand, keeping the IP of a company a company secret
despite having several patents is a vital measure for keeping the business
running well for the very own benefit and not for the pocket of some other
people, including the big big pockets of his lawyers. Technology was meant
for getting a nice refund from other people for providing them wanted products.
That is the true base of the "demand and delivery" market concept. Getting
distracted from that economy core by courtroum events is contra productive.
Therefore its a well funded strategy of any company to avoid getting to court
so that they can in turn preserve their productivity and end up in a nice benefit.
-Alex.
> -------- Forwarded Message --------
> > From: Jon Smirl <[email protected]>
> > Reply-To: Jon Smirl <[email protected]>
> > To: Dave Airlie <[email protected]>
> > Cc: Kendall Bennett <[email protected]>, Linux Kernel Mailing
> > List <[email protected]>
> > Subject: Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable?
> > Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 23:55:58 -0400
> > I wish they could just get together and agree not to sue each other
> > over stupid things like register designs and programming models. The
> > designs are horrible on both cards due to accumulation of historical
> > cruft. Save the lawsuits for the core of the engines if you really
> > have to sue each other.
> >
> > --
> > Jon Smirl
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 19:12:15 +0200, Alexander Stohr
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Jon, Hi audience,
>
> (I just got aware of that discussion because i got that mail CCed
> trough a resend on a general discussion list about software patents.)
>
> Even if ATI and nVidia, plus maybe even IBM, would sign a well written
> and working agreement between them all, it would not stop anybody else
> out there in the world that is holding patents from inspecting the unveiled
> data and then looking for specific things that might work for pressing out
> some Billion dollars from those companys. Patents do work, but they do
> work mostly for the lawers income, and for companys that have the only
> purpose for getting revenues from a "bought up" patent portfolio. Those
> can be really nastys, even if you are Microsoft you dont like to pull out
The best way to make this work would be to get ATI, nVidia, IBM and
Intel into a room and do a cross licensing deal on the interface
portion of the designs. If the four companies also enter into a mutual
defense pact that will stop any third parties from causing trouble.
On the other hand, this strategy doesn't work if you are currently,
knowingly violating an existing valid patent.
Keeping things secret does nothing to protect you from a patent
infringement suit. All it does is make it a little harder to initially
detect that there are grounds for one. Once someone files suit they
will use the legal process to get all your secret designs anyway.
I also question if keeping interfaces secret is gaining anyone any
advantages over the competitors. Everyone involved possess an
excellent engineering staff capable of easily figuring out what the
other groups are doing. GPUs compete on functional units, chip
processes, parallelism, marketing and manufacturing cost, not on the
device driver programming model.
My belief is that everyone involved would gain from contributing to a
common pool of code for Linux. I don't believe that doing this is
going to alter anyone's market share; but it will make the users a lot
happier and breed goodwill for all involved.
--
Jon Smirl
[email protected]