AMD Ports Open-Source Linux GPU Driver To Windows 107
An anonymous reader writes "An AMD engineer has inadvertently revealed that their Windows Embedded graphics driver is ported from the open-source Linux driver. AMD China last year began porting the open-source Radeon Linux kernel driver to Windows Embedded Compact 7, rather than using their Windows Catalyst driver. The resulting WEC7 driver for Radeon GPUs is proprietary, but that's allowed per the MIT license that the ATI-AMD Linux driver code is provided under."
... and the problem is? (Score:2, Insightful)
The resulting WEC7 driver for Radeon GPUs is proprietary, but that's allowed per the MIT license that the ATI-AMD Linux driver code is provided under."
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, when you think of it, it's rather inspired. AMD does eventually drop support for old cards after a period, providing an opensource option allows for programmers to maintain support indefinitely. Plus, I'm guessing that this will increase the number of programmers interested in working on the drivers.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, when you think of it, it's rather inspired. AMD does eventually drop support for old cards after a period, providing an opensource option allows for programmers to maintain support indefinitely. Plus, I'm guessing that this will increase the number of programmers interested in working on the drivers.
Except the WE7 driver won't be open source, so... no.
Re:... and the problem is? (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is where people start wishing the code were GPL instead of MIT.
If the original driver were published with a copyleft license, those power management improvements would have to be shared when the drivers are released. With MIT, you can only hope that AMD will see the benefit of sharing their improvements.
You can argue about what freedom means all you want, but it's hard to argue that having almost guaranteed access to improvements wouldn't be good for the users of the Linux driver.