I think Proprietary software and FOSS compliment each other and we would not have
much innovation without proprietary software as it comes with innovation
On the other hand FOSS comes with great liberty and flexibility
Do you believe they could/should co-exist …???
if a gpu manufacturer creates an FOSS Driver for its products it would be great! But there is some issues like software/hardware design that the manufacturer would like to keep secret which is a evil necessity due to the business model…
Here is what I think: the basic driver (2D/3D acceleration and few other basic things) should be open-source, the rest like VDPAU, 3D Vision, SLI, PhysX acceleration, HDMI stuff or anything else should be proprietary and be additional packages to be used with the open-source driver! the manufacturer would keep some of its secret to be used with the proprietary application.
it’s just a thought of mine, so I doubt that any GPU manufacturer would do such a thing any time soon, but it would be great if they did!
What exactly would the incentive be to create new products ? FOSS is a hobby thing basically. Proprietary software is about making a profit. the two can coexist in that a proprietary software vendor can write software for a opensource OS, as is the case with linux and some other systems. However the idea of most companies turning out products is to make money and giving away that IP is not conducive to turning a profit.
Frankly I’d buy a copy of Haiku if it was closed source. I just want good software that works, the FOSs community cann keep all the philosophical leanings IMHO.
[OT] FOSS is not a hobby as you say. Many companies have build a good business model based on FOSS like Red Hat, IBM, SUN, VMware, Cisco and others. In my opinion I prefer FOSS instead of a proprietary software. I can modify the software without having to pay a cent! I do agree with you about having good software that works. Software sales have been on decrease the last few years. MySQL, Apache and others software are showing increase where Proprietary equivalent are decreasing. I do work FOSS and I saw many big companies asking me for support and migration. Sometime it’s a pain to migrate but things turn out nicely.[/OT]
In this case it would say that a Hardware manufacturer like Nvidia or AMD would not lose their IP by going Open source! See AMD and the Gallium3D project, AMD is releasing documentation and collaborating on the source code for their GPU.
Proprietary software is fine. I will always prefer free software when it’s of comparable quality, but proprietary software makes the developer more money and money motivates people.
I use LabVIEW, MATLAB, Mathematica, Igor Pro on a weekly basis. There are no real substitutes for these (though, Octave really is close to replacing MATLAB and I’ve written much of my code in it).
I don’t have a problem with using this software, because I feel like I have signed a business contract with these software developers. From my point of view, these apps make me more productive, so there is no problem with striking a mutually beneficial agreement with another person/group.
What I do have a problem with, is when Microsoft Windows decides to not allow a person to log in to his/her own damn computer because of some serial key nonsense.
That’s why I prefer FOSS, in general. Even if every piece of proprietary software on my computer killed itself, I’d still be able to boot up, send an email, view the web, etc. My computer is mine.
I think proprietary software not have to be considered a problem on Haiku as it is on Linux, that has a very anti-proprietary behavior (the kernel cryes when it loads a proprietary driver: it feels taintend 
).
So if XXX hardware house want do a proprietary driver for Haiku we have to accept gratefully: if it works well from user point of view what is the problem? I hope Haiku kernel not feels “tainted” :-)))
I think that a proprietary driver done from the hardware manufacturer can be a lot better that one done reverse-engineering: some functionality can be always missed…
@ fano: well yes reverse engineering software/driver/stuff will always lack something! nouveau project is a good reverse engineering example! It works fine but it’s way to slow to evolve compared to what gallium3d and amd are. If Nvidia would release some of their gpu’s docs, foss or just open source community could achieve much more results! I’ve seen good proprietary software around (adobe photoshop i.e.) that i would like to have a linux/haiku version so i can play with my photos… GIMP is cool, i know the basic stuff (ain’t a photo specialist!!!), i can do few stuff but have to admit that photoshop is easier to use… maybe in my case is a question of user interface… but for hardware driver i would prefer foss instead of proprietary…
[quote=Setlec][OT] FOSS is not a hobby as you say. Many companies have build a good business model based on FOSS like Red Hat, IBM, SUN, VMware, Cisco and others. In my opinion I prefer FOSS instead of a proprietary software. I can modify the software without having to pay a cent! I do agree with you about having good software that works. Software sales have been on decrease the last few years. MySQL, Apache and others software are showing increase where Proprietary equivalent are decreasing. I do work FOSS and I saw many big companies asking me for support and migration. Sometime it’s a pain to migrate but things turn out nicely.[/OT]
In this case it would say that a Hardware manufacturer like Nvidia or AMD would not lose their IP by going Open source! See AMD and the Gallium3D project, AMD is releasing documentation and collaborating on the source code for their GPU.[/quote]
theres a difference between FOSS and what IBM redhat are doing. There commercial apps are not free either as in beer.
As much as I am behind the guys at gallium, flatly they are light years behind in raw performance compared to the in house blobs. some of this is undoubtedly the byproduct of JIt compiler tech advantages that the inhouse raedeon drivers have over gallium. Obviously there is some seriously locked up IP becuase AMD isn’t releasing the compiler tech to the developer community. That is ultimately what is holding the gallium driver back. Lack of a fast/efficient enough jit. the memory managers etc, thats the easy stuff, what really hard is building code to pipe to the card thats cpu efficient.
I am curious who owns the rights to these compilers.
AMD only release documentation about the GPU design and few of them, also the AMD team behind gallium use what has been already written by VMware… AFAIK of course!
Red hat was the 1st company which promoted linux and also revolutionized linux with RPM! But they changed their business model a couple of years ago… they sell support and an enterprise optimized linux distrib! that’s how they do make money… IBM to reduce the costs of AIX they switch to linux also they are behind a few project such worlcomunitydgrid and others. I used to work at IBM and they do many things in the open-source world!
Gallium is held back by the lack of coders basically and the lack of more AMD GPU documentation…
for the compilers rights i’ve no clue…
FYI Sun Microsystems doesn’t really exist anymore they got eaten by oracle…
The philosophy of accepting only open-source software on Linux is holding back that platform on the desktop. I hope that Haiku will attract a mix of open-source and proprietary software so as to get out of the sub-1% market-share ghetto that Linux has been in for over a decade on the desktop. Haiku being a desktop OS means that it has a different set of priorities than a server OS like Linux. Even if you consider Linux to be a desktop OS, certainly you must admit that the philosophy of Haiku is and should be different from Linux.
In the areas where proprietary software does exist on Linux, like video card drivers, the functionality tends to be better than the open source equivalent. So there is room for both even on that platform.
I’d love to see closed-source software, big and small, available in the Windows and/or Mac world on Haiku such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, TextMate, Sublime Text, Pixelmator, and many others ported to Haiku. Although I admit that is not a likely possibility.
Furthermore I’d love to see open-source software such as Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, Calligra Suit, Libre Office, The GIMP, Audacity, VLC, and many more properly ported to Haiku as well.
Proprietary vendor-supported drivers would also be nice to have for hardware we don’t currently support or support poorly. Wifi drivers come to mind off-hand. A better selection of fonts, including proprietary fonts would also be nice to have. Although I understand that is not possible in a free (as in beer) OS.
I am not opposed to paying for good software, whether proprietary or open source, and I would hate for Haiku to be identified with the notion that paying for software is taboo.
That being said, Haiku is a re-implementation of a closed-source proprietary OS that went away when the company that produced it died forcing it’s developers and users to start over from scratch. So, Haiku itself should remain open source and not rely on proprietary software in the base install as much as possible so that it does not meet the same fate.
Perhaps a pay-for version of the OS could be created someday that included proprietary extras like fonts and drivers. Although that might be a bit too far on the proprietary side for some people. We would need to have that kind software available before we could consider how to distribute it anyway.