[Bf-funboard] Physical Memory and Cycles

[Brecht Van Lommel]

I don't want to get in a discussion here, but I'll just say that from
working on Cycles OpenCL support and talking to AMD developers I did
not get this impression at all. Note we are talking here about the
closed source AMD implementation of OpenCL which is used by both open
source and closed source projects.

Brecht.

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 12:23 PM, Patrick Shirkey
<pshirkey at boosthardware.com> wrote:
> - They refuse to actively support open source projects.
> - They release incomplete documentation when they do "throw us a bone"
> even going so far as to suggest we reverse engineer the information we
> need from proprietary projects which have full access to their internal
> documentation.
> - In the case of Blender and FFMPEG they fund competing proprietary
> projects run by their mates.
> - They spend a large amount of money on closed source solutions that use
> their proprietary API's. To get access to the proprietary docs requires
> spending large sums of money on an ongoing basis.
> - They actively work to cripple their existing drivers.
> - They don't provide details for open source implmentations of their drivers.
> - They retire driver support and stop selling hardware just about as soon
> as they have made them work effectively for Open Source users.
> - They are no longer producing motherboards that can be used with Linux.
> All their latest boards require UEFI.
> - They refuse to provide test devices to the people who can build the open
> source software/drivers that can run on their hardware while at the same
> time providing them to their proprietary projects run by their mates.
>
> If that is not enough "evidence" for you they are actively courting,
> wooing and taking kickbacks from their mates at Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft
> so they can have their hardware in the next generation of gaming consoles.
>
> AMD as a company or at least certain people at AMD are doing everything
> they can to hobble or cripple the progress of opensource.