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This claim is wrong. It’s not about sabotaging competitors, it’s about being afraid that your competitors would steal your IP they gives you an advantage.

Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified.

If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different. But you can’t prevent somebody from reading even GPL code, being “inspired” by it, and writing something different enough that does the same thing with the same ideas. Like just look at the LLVM project were people look at what GCC code does every now and then for “inspiration”.

> Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified. If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different.

Intel's GPU drivers are free software, they even contribute them themselves, same goes for AMD.

I think NVIDIA's different because they have the Apple mentality of them being the real innovators, (regardless of fact) and building their internal culture on secrecy, closeness even to other teams within the company etc. I think they consider it as part of their 'coolness factor', together with the CEO being on stage dressed like a rock star from the 80s.

The fact that they benefit from Linux massively and that having an open driver would win them massive goodwill is not directly measurable in terms of their balance sheet, at least in the short term, plus it would remove some of the secrecy.

They do so by using different teams, and their open source variants always lag behind what their closed source drivers are capable of doing across Windows, Apple and game consoles.

The drivers are decent enough nonetheless. I think having an open driver done by a different team and maybe a bit less optimized is still preferable to not having an official open driver at all.

I used to enjoy my OpenGL 4.1 driver on Radeon HD 6250, which was still short of OpenGL 4.4/DX 11 on Windows, but still quite ok I guess, all it does now with open source drivers is OpenGL 3.3.

So no that isn't decent enough, and I only keep it like this, because it is just a little travel laptop that I keep on using until it eventually dies.

Why even mention a fairly ancient GPU when AMD has really only gotten their act together fairly recently with amdgpu, but that supports Vulkan as I would expect.

I don't get this constant obsession with mentioning how 8 years ago this and this on Linux sucked. Yes, it did, things improved considerably since then.

If you're only willing to run Linux on ancient, underpowered hardware and then complain about the experience, be my guest, but I think you'd be better served by a Mac.

There's a whole class of people who run Linux on shitty little laptops and then compare the experience to their brand new iMac. I guess somewhere there's still the mentality that since one's not paying for Linux, it's not for my serious hardware, only second hand.

As much as I'd have liked for AMD to get their shit together sooner, I am glad they eventually did and are improving amdgpu at a decent speed.

That was just one example, I can provide more up to date ones as well.

Indeed, that is why this Linux laptop is the surviving one that still runs Linux on bare metal, everywhere else I just VMs, if at all.

Having worked for a GPU company, it's not even about stealing IP. It's about giving ammo to your competitors for suing you. If you publish the source code to your drivers then let's say Nvidia can read through them and find a few similarities in your hardware to something they have patented, and then sue you for IP infringement. They can't do this without some evidence that there might be a similarity, but weak evidence is enough. So they basically send you a set of 100 patents that they say you violate, and then it's your job to spend your legal resources to show how you don't violate those patents. It might be easy to show this for say 90 of those patents, but there can be a few which require considerable work, and if you're a small company you don't have the resources to fight off lawsuits all the time. So open sourcing your drivers opens you up to a lot of potential attacks, with very little upside. More specifically, it opens up the companies that buy GPU IP from you to attacks. Nvidia on the other hand has the resources to keep throwing accusations at you and see what sticks and force you to burn cash on legal resources.

That is an assumption. I think the simpler case is it's more work and exposes potential security vulnerabilities they don't care to patch or maintain. Function > all.

The incentive to keeping it closed source is primarily part of a strategy to sabotage their competitors, which I hope is not a behavior that anyone here is complicit in.

I can't figure out what you mean by "sabotage their competitors". The term sabotage indicates that they are performing actions to actively harm their competitors, how is that related to keeping your source, which cointains your IP, private?

The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like.

It is nice to hear that they are welcome :p. Which they would even feel more so, if there were actual incentives being offered rather than trying to make their life artificial difficult.