Community Matters

Obviously giving people source to your drivers exposes all you IP, while keeping your drivers binary only protects the IP from prying eyes.

So why do I waste time writing about this? Because to me it’s not that easy. And as it turns out, it may not be in the real world, either. Plenty of lawsuits are filed based on binary drivers. It is actually surprisingly easy to de-compile a binary driver and get a very good idea what it’s doing. Mind you, that’s illegal in the US and a bunch of other countries that have signed treaties with the US - but in large parts of the world nothing is stopping you from doing that.

There are a number of open source drivers for popular hardware that were developed exactly that way - this started 10 years ago when Matrox before gave us documentation for their chipsets. And continues today. So how much protection is there really in a binary only driver? Not much. You are making it a little harder for people with ill will. That’s all.

On the other side, creating open source drivers allows you to control which part of the functionality of your hardware you expose to the public. It also allows you to influence the thinking of people playing with your chips. And, oh-by-the-way, it gets people to play with your chips - and maybe even develop innovative software that uses the features of the chip that you document and expose in your open source driver.

This is all very simplified, but so far what we have is

Seems like an easy choice. But I’ll come back to the topic and drill down a little deeper on some of the fears.

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?