I think the incentive to keep drivers closed is not huge, but the incentive to open source them is effectively nil, especially from the point of view of "management types".
It may on may not end up improving support, but you can't really know that ahead of time. Then you have the risk of people using your code against you, finding vulnerabilities, patent/IP violations or simply reverse-engineering your hardware more easily. You also won't be able to cheat in benchmarks anymore.
There's a cultural aspect to it too. Paying all these engineers to write that code was expensive, and now you want to give it all away for free? Most companies never do that for anything, why would they make an exception?
It's dumb, I too would love for these drivers to become open source, but it doesn't look like it will be happening any time soon.
> Paying all these engineers to write that code was expensive, and now you want to give it all away for free? Most companies never do that for anything, why would they make an exception?
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I've been doing professional software development for more than twenty years and have never encountered this. There's plenty of "we should be paid for our work and innovation" but nothing so reflexive as what you describe here.
It may on may not end up improving support, but you can't really know that ahead of time. Then you have the risk of people using your code against you, finding vulnerabilities, patent/IP violations or simply reverse-engineering your hardware more easily. You also won't be able to cheat in benchmarks anymore.
There's a cultural aspect to it too. Paying all these engineers to write that code was expensive, and now you want to give it all away for free? Most companies never do that for anything, why would they make an exception?
It's dumb, I too would love for these drivers to become open source, but it doesn't look like it will be happening any time soon.