New matrox driver posted

[runderwo]

As for NDA's the info always gets out - look at something as silly as the parhelia release.

Yeah, and do you have any idea how much a breach of contract suit would cost whoever leaked it?

If your going to do a job then do it properly and support it fully is the way i think they should go, nice and proffesional like the client base they aim at now.

Yeah, that sounds fine, except that they aren't currently doing that, and their competitors are. Matrox's drivers seem to work in certain phases of the moon, and only when you haven't looked at them the wrong way.

Also if some open source developed drivers were not working chances are M would have a bunch of winging customers

So what? They don't have to advertise the availability of third party drivers to their customers. It certainly doesn't seem to be hurting ATI to do so, however.

I personally dont like the idea of open source, there are no $$$'s in it for the ppl who do the grind and as such theres no incentive to fix a problem

You haven't any idea how "open source" works. If you need a hint, it's that hobbyist programmers are only a part of the overall picture. There are plenty of $$$'s in it for people who work for companies like IBM, SGI, Sun, etc who have decided that supporting a particular open source project is in their best interest, and for people who work for distribution vendors who want to provide a better product to their customers. Not to mention independent contractors like myself who improve software for pay.

One thing you are correct about is that there is little commercial motivation for open source 3D development. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. For example, when ATI offered docs under NDA for their early Radeon cards, the Weather Channel funded development of open source 3D functionality for those cards. Matrox itself funded the development of the open source G-series driver, in a previous life. 3dfx did the same, not that it kept their shareholders from cutting off life support.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Sasq
Is there any good reason why Matrox should give other companies free range to work out how M has maganged to get Dual Head etc working so well - for free?

They don't need Matrox's permission. To anybody that has sufficient will and funding (id est, any major graphics company), a little reverse engineering and decompiling is easy.

All Matrox is doing is putting up walls to stop people that would have been <B>helping</B> them. The G200's Linux drivers kicked ass because of the released specs.