Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 06, 2005 08:57 AM
"They're obsessed with the "value" of their "intellectual property""
They're a hardware company without their own fabs. Their entire worth as a company is their IP (and brand name to a small extent). A software company can survive as an open source company if they can earn money based on a service model as does Red Hat. VIA does not have hardware that requires services. If their drivers contain code that could allow someone to create equivilent hardware with a fraction of the R&D expense, VIA would soon be out of business if they released it. If the hardware is just a specialized DSP, the driver code could in effect be the specs for building the chip's instruction set.
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Re:I don't think VIA completely understands
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 06, 2005 08:57 AMThey're a hardware company without their own fabs. Their entire worth as a company is their IP (and brand name to a small extent). A software company can survive as an open source company if they can earn money based on a service model as does Red Hat. VIA does not have hardware that requires services. If their drivers contain code that could allow someone to create equivilent hardware with a fraction of the R&D expense, VIA would soon be out of business if they released it. If the hardware is just a specialized DSP, the driver code could in effect be the specs for building the chip's instruction set.
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