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Originally Posted by kcyanks1  I'm somewhat confused here. nVidia (to pick on them) sells graphics cards. People don't buy nVidia products because they have great drivers. Some people who are more extreme and me in their beliefs will *not* buy nVidia products because of their (unopen) drivers. If nVidia were to just open their drivers, Linux drivers would be created for them -- they wouldn't even have to put effort in. That would be a "solution", I think. (Not trying to be a wiseass, I perhaps am just not following what you are saying.) |
It's the same reason companies don't always patent things. If nVidia puts their drivers out there for the world to see, then AMD can figure out how nVidia does things, and possibly improve their drivers without actually infringing on any patents. It would be like Intel posting a schematic of their core design. No, AMD can't copy it, but they can get ideas from it. It's due to the trade secret aspect of the drivers.
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Mac controls all of the hardware and software. If one party has full control over the entire system, compatability is much easier.
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It's more than that for Mac, it's built into the OS:
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Originally Posted by Wikipedia Because device drivers in operating systems with monolithic kernels, and in many operating systems with hybrid kernels, execute within the operating system kernel, it is possible to run the kernel as a 32-bit process while still supporting 64-bit user processes. This provides the memory and performance benefits of 64-bit for users without breaking binary compatibility with existing 32-bit device drivers, at the cost of some additional overhead within the kernel. This is the mechanism by which Mac OS X enables 64-bit processes while still supporting 32-bit device drivers. |
Must...stop...threadjacking...