Legacy GPU´s open drivers?

[jc87]

We all heard the arguments about GPU manufacturers not wanting to open up their drivers/specs, but i started thinking, what if they worked together with the community to make open drivers for the legacy models?

Reason why this could work:

A) After some point when they stop selling a GPU, updating the drivers of the respective model becomes a burden without monetary compensation, if they open source the drivers or give the community the necessary tools to produce their own, for them then monetary speaking would been a win-win situation.

B) Since we are talking about legacy models, the secrets revealed by opening up the drivers would be mostly obsolete (after all GPU´s do evolve at an amazing speed), so from the competitive point of view few or nothing would be lost.

C) Would be a good experience with small risk to determine if there would be worthy supporting open drivers or not.

D) For people who buy a GPU with only binary drivers available would be a good hardware-life insurance, because if they started to work to make available open source legacy drivers, that way he would have a collateral in which there would still be available open drivers after there was no more binary drivers official support. Some people which own an Ati Radeon lower than 9500 no longer can use the fglrx driver with the most recent kernels for instance.

Now what i would like to know is if he can convince with sucess Nvidea/Ati to take this risk.

[zachtib]

I'm all for it. I'm about to buy a laptop with GMA 950 solely for the driver support. If at some point, I could buy a laptop with a dedicated video card with open drivers, that would be a good day.

I also think it would be worth convincing ATI/Nvidia to open if not their drivers, at least the specifications of their newer cards so that open source drivers can be created. If, for instance, ATI was to open the specifications of their cards enough that open drivers could be created, then IMO, they could discontinue their fglrx driver altogether, which would mean less work for them in the long run, no?

I understand closed-source applications. I'm a CECS major, and realize that software engineers have the right to make money off of their work. While I applaud anyone that open sources their code, I understand that it's not for everyone.

However, with drivers, it seems like the company would benefit from the opening of their drivers. By letting the community essentially take over the development of their driver, they could reduce their own cost. ATI made momey when I bought my laptop with an ATI card in it, but they didn't make anything when I downloaded subsequent releases of the fglrx driver. Hardware companies make money by selling hardware, not drivers.