*BSD News Article 64550


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From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.development.system,comp.os.linux.x,comp.os.linux.hardware,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Why to not buy Matrox Millennium
Date: 29 Mar 1996 08:58:11 GMT
Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services
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Byron A Jeff <byron@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>Hardware generally cannot be reverse engineered from the specifications
>of the interface to the hardware.
>
>Imagine a black box that converts a stream of numbers into another
>stream of numbers:
>
>
>1,2,3,4 -> Black Box -> -3, 78, 3.145926, 0
>
>Tell me what's in the box? This is what we're supposed to be able to do
>given the interface specifications right?
>
>I don't think so...

But to clone the functionality, I don't need to know what's in the black
box.  With Diamond, the hardware differences between their cards and
competitors cards was small--they used the same graphics chips, but Diamond
had different support chips.  In effect, the differences were confined to
a small black box.  Given just the interface to that black box, someone
probably could easily come up with a functionally equivalent black box, so
at least Diamond had a remotely plausible reason for wanting to keep the
interface secret.  In other words, the only thing stopping a cloner is
the knowledge of what interface they have to implement.

On the other hand, Matrox uses their own graphics chip.  The black box
is massively bigger than the Diamond black box.  Just knowing the interface
won't save a cloner very much time, so their reasons for wanting to keep
the interface secret are a lot weaker than Diamond's was.  In other words,
the big task a cloner faces with Matrox is designing and building a
sophisticated graphics chip.  Even if they were given the interface, they
still have a lot of work ahead of them, and the time saved by not having
to also reverse engineer the interface will probably not be that significant
over the life of the project.

What Matrox should at least seriously consider doing is release everything
that is *NOT* related to 3-D graphics.  If they did that, the perception of
many people could be changed from "this card works in DOS/Windows, but does
not work with XFree86 so is useless with Linux or FreeBSD for me" to "this
card works in DOS/Windows and also with XFree86.  It also has some additional
features that are only available in DOS/Windows or with a commercial X server".
That'a a much less negative way to be perceived.

--Tim Smith