From: danielce@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Daniel AMP Carosone) Subject: Re: The Sega Lawsuit and Diamond Date: 7 Nov 1992 03:29:46 GMT
cosc17zz@menudo.uh.edu (Daniel Supernaw-Issen) writes:
>Last night the following occured to me. Given that Sega lost its lawsuit
>resulting in a ruling that allowed the dissassembly of ROMs for the purposes
>of creating an interfacing product, why can't Diamonds ROMs be similarly
>disassembled? It seems to me that in light of the ruling, Xfree could in
>fact support diamond products WITHOUT signing a non-disclosure agreement and
>without compromising the copy-left.
Technically speaking it could be, but probably won't for two reasons
(at least):
1) Diamond would probably sue *anyway*, would probably lose (provided
you have the funds to meet them in court), and would probably even
consider the legal fees money well spent on closing you down.
Frankly, if they sued, they might even win on default, since
linuxers wouldn't be able to afford to fight them in court.
Remember that the SEGA case above was between two large commercial
operations, fighting for revenues from games sales, so the legal
fees are worth spending (to them).
2) Doing so would totally miss the point. Diamond has decided to try
and keep the programming information secret, made up non-disclosure
agreements for people to sign, and gone to a whole lot of trouble
to prevent software developers having free (or even moderately
easy) access to it. The end result can only be fewer software
packages able to drive the card (Free, Commercial, or otherwise)
and therefore fewer sales of the card -- their choice. If they
want things this way, Free Software developers should *make a
point* not to support the product, even if they can get access to
the information via other means, to discourage such a narrow-minded
corporate attitude. Try and find out why GNU is boycotting Apple
for another example.
This is rather rough on people who already have these cards -- but
that's a natural consequence of Diamond's policies. For those people,
I can only suggest trying to get your card exchanged for another, and
writing to Diamond explaining exactly *why* you are doing so. Do this
even if someone does reverse-engineer a driver to help those who
cannot change cards.
There are other S3-based cards on the market, some cheaper (and some
of those even reportedly faster, but I don't know - I suppose someone
has to pay for Diamond's lawyers), for which programming information
is readily available, and which will be supported.
(Crossposted to gnu.misc.discuss, and followups to there)
_______________________________________________________________________________
Daniel AMP Carosone. email: danielce@ee.mu.oz.au snail: 37 Wandin Road
Computer/Software Eng, IRC: Waftam Camberwell 3124
University of Melbourne. Vox: +61 3 882 8910 Australia