Trident Micro Changes Policy Toward XFree86

Alex writes: "According to Egbert on the Xpert Xfree86 mailing list, Trident Microsystems, who makes video chipsets for low end PC's and notebooks, has changed its policy towards open source developers. Get the details here." If you want to email Trident Micro Public Relations, please be polite! Flaming will only hurt the chances that Trident will reverse this decision.

Re:Code monkeys

[LordNimon]

It's not worth the effort. Video hardware is immensely complicated. A Linux video driver programmer could add support for 10 other chips in the time it would to reverse-engineer the Windows drivers.

Re:Code monkeys

[ZxCv]

It's not so much the chip won't be supported at all-- the standard Trident driver should still work. What they're referring to more is the proprietary acceleration features built into the chip. Those types of added features and benefits (which are actually probably required for any decent output from the card) are what will be missing.

Re:Boo Hoo

[jchristopher]

ATI's laptop support is HORRIBLE. The chips themselves may be fine, but their driver support is abominable. What's a good card without drivers?

They have basically stopped driver updates on the Mobility series, even though that chipset is used in many CURRENTLY shipping products.

They won't fix dual display under Windows 2000/XP, even though every other manufacturer has figured it out.

If you are in the market for a laptop, I would highly recommend getting something with the new Nvidia chipset.

Re:No need to write to Trident

[emissary47]

hmh, i just read the press page at trident [tridentmicro.com],
it seems that hp,ibm,acer want to use their XP cards in notebooks:

Trident's CyberBlade XP Selected For HP Pavilion Notebooks [tridentmicro.com]
Trident and ALi's CyberBLADE ALADDiN i1 Wins in IBM's [tridentmicro.com]
ThinkPad i Series 1200+1300
ACER Selects Trident and ALi's CyberBLADE ALADDiN i1 For TravelMate 350 Notebook [tridentmicro.com]

Re:Code monkeys

[reynaert]

Before hardware vendors started to 'supply' drivers, coders in the community wrote their own.

Before hardware vendors started to 'supply' drivers, they supplied specifications and other documentation.

For example, my good old Star matrix printer came with a booklet detailling the printer 'language'. It even included sample code. If you have that, writing drivers is a piece of cake.

confusion over trident

[johnjones]

there has always been a bit of confusion over trident drivers

e.g. the CYBER9385 this had at one stage 3 drivers distributed in a major release this is because they named chips the same

Trident supplies low cost chips because they are small (as in die size) and thus makes them less power hungry which is essential in laptops

the problem is that lately they have done into the onboard chipset market with Mother Board manufactures garbing them as a cheap way to stick video on board

then trident accelerated parts of their chips for these vendors

they have always been tight but allowed NDA people to help out writing drivers

the people you should complain to are the MB manufacturers who properly paid for the work to be done

so this begs the question who uses trident that you know ?

me I know SIS do so

write to
China
Ms. Ellie Yin
Tel:886+2+29161619 ext.346
E-mail: [e-mail].

Europe, Taiwan, Japan, Korea:
Ms. Jessie Lee
Tel:886+2+29161619 ext.341
E-mail: [e-mail]

America(Canada,U.S., and Latin America), Oceania:
Miss Michele Huang
Tel:886+2+29161619 ext.345
E-mail: [e-mail].

for your appropriate dealer

regards

john jones

Sample email

[Maskirovka]

Take 30 seconds out of your day and send them a quick email. Seriously.

To: [e-mail]

I'm writing to register my displeasure for trident's new policy towards open source. Making your documentation available is not a whole lot to ask, and in the process of not working with us, you are alienating a large group of people and technologies.
Thanks for lissening.

Toby

The opinions expressed in this email are mine, and are not necessarily those of my employer.

I've been at this for a while..

[PianoMan8]

A wide range of comments:

The trident BladeXP is a low end chip, but offers several nice things. For starters, it uses up a total of .8W of power. It has an integrated T&L Engine, and it's windows performance is decent. It is not an SMA chipset either. It has it's own framebuffer.

HP is the major vendor that ships with Trident in thier laptops. Complain to HP as well, and tell them they're losing business. THEY will put pressure on trident.

I baught my HP N5430 (Duron 850) BECAUSE it has a trident chip and not an ATI one. (Compaq ships their duron notebooks with ATI). I figured that trident has always supported Linux, so this would be no different.. Now HP got my money, Trident got my money, and I got shafted.

I've been in touch with trident to get the docs, and they gave me the Blade3D (same line as CyberBlade series in Vaio's, etc..) specs easily enough, but the BladeXP requires a restrictive NDA.

Alan Houraine (sp?) is the XFree developer who's been workingon this, and is having the same problem I did.

The 2D support is unaccelerated, but quite tolerable with shadowFB enabled for this chipset. I'm writing this from my laptop now and in general, I'm quite happy about how 2D is working. Makes me wonder just how good accelerated 2D would be. Go here [deater.net] for info on how to configure this chip under Linux.

pm.

Re:Sample Letter

[fizban]

deliterious = deleterious

Either way you spell it, it'll just confuse their public relations interns anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter.

On a second note, the word "irregardless" should be replaced with "regardless" as the "ir" part is redundant and not accepted in formal writing.

Just doing my good deed for the day before everyone copies and pastes this letter a hundred times.

Its just Open Source vs. IP confidentiality

[kbonin]

Competitive advantages w/ hardware often turn on clever use of data flow within chip designs, and it is often possible to obtain patents on such designs. At the same time, aspects of these designs are often exposed in driver API's.

It is a common beleif (I've had lawyers give conflicting advice in this area) that protecting API's under NDA's helps defend against a competitor figuring out what you're doing from "public domain" information and thereby having a legal basis to circumvent a patent.

The technical and legal merit of this position are certainly arguable.

You could also add that "opening" an API requires spending some effort (and $) spent on creating publicly readable documentation (although I've had to work with documentation from many non-English companies that apparently hired elementary school students to translate...)

Closed source drivers for such cards seem like a great solution for this problem, but many people in the open source community have 'religious' problems with this.

No real conspiracy, just business

[alsta]

Part of this information is retrieved from a person I know and part of it is fiction. The relevance to the XFree thing is the last two paragraphs.

So here is the thing.

Trident has filed a patent for a technology that they want to use in their new line of chips. We can all agree on how evil patents are, but they are allowed to file patents. In order to use a patent pending status, you can't disclose source code or specs. That being freely available invites others to implement the technology. So to be awarded a patent one must take reasonable steps to prevent others from copying the design. If that isn't being done, the patent can be considered void in a patent lawsuit. After that, the technology is considered Public Domain.

If Trident wishes that this patent goes through, they need to take this action. Otherwise somebody can simply retrieve a spec from them and/or work out the source code and reimplement in another chip.

I could care less if Microsoft subsidised this or not. Trident is allowed to publish specs if they want to and withold them if they so desire. This is their right.

All I know is that I will not be purchasing any Trident products in the future. This is my right. Until the day that legislators tell me that I MUST buy a Trident product I am not going to complain about this. There are plenty of other chip makers out there and they make good stuff. In my opinion, Trident chips have always been flaky and low budget.

Alex

Re:Boo Hoo

[Nailer]

Really? At Linux.conf.au I asked a member of the XFree86 team who'd just finished a taslk what chipset he'd recommend for mobile users. His response was the ATI Rage Mobility (16Mb model). Open Source drivers, the all important XVideo support, and good performance (better than the same card under Windows) was the absis for his decision.

Re:Who cares?

[Raven667]

While I wouldn't buy Trident for performance but they are traditionally very reliable. The people I know have built OEM whitebox computers in the past know which vendors are reliable and which aren't, they prefer Trident based boards because they are cheap and people don't have to return them. Other, whizzier, video chipsets tend to have more wierd issues with particular software or they overheat and die, but the Trident based boards didn't have these problems.

Umm, they only closed access to open source projec

[misleb]

THey are not cutting off everyone from the specs. Just the people who plan on publishing the source code.

-matthew

Re:Please enlighten me

[clueless_penguin]

I work for a large semiconductor company, in a small design team that also does work for other groups. We primarily work with the company's imaging division. We almost always either provide a gpl Linux driver or will release enough specs so someone can do this. However, most of the company still believes in closed source. A lot of this is because of NDA/partnership agreements with other IP holders. Please remember that is is _extremely_ expensive to design and produce a complex chip. There is an overwhelming urge to protect that investment. But management often forget that we are not a software vendor, and opening the specs will sell more chips. In our case, some progress has been made, but there are still huge cultural hurdles to overcome.