Like it literally does come down to the same thing as people say about nvidia: this is closed source and it’s not compatible with copyleft licensing. GPL can’t touch proprietary symbols any more than proprietary code can touch GPL symbols.
Nvidia can support it because they have a closed firmware and the symbols are buried in blobs. And that has its advantages too, like this situation!
If you can chase HDMI forum to open a minimal set of symbols, fine, and it sounds like AMD has been working on that. But there is a lot of closed IP in the graphics world that will simply never be opened and it’s unlikely that the closed driver will ever be opened up as a result (the open driver will be a rewrite without IP taint). Graphics IP is just not a world compatible with copyleft and they’re ok with that, if copyleft suffers consequences oh well, Linux is probably <1% of their revenue base.
Copyleft is fundamentally about inventing a new, joyfully communist codebase, not gluing proprietary code onto community code. That’s why it’s GPL and not BSD - Nvidia’s license or hdmi forum’s license is not a problem on FreeBSD! And in this case you simply must invent your own 48gbps display standard, but with hookers and blow, and then drive sufficient adoption in the market, just as Linux had to do for software. Or someone already did that and it’s called DisplayPort.
But hdmi is proprietary license and you can’t use it unless and until they relicense to something GPL compatible. That’s the price of the Linux kernel, is it delivering some value here that BSD or minix wouldn’t for you?
Again though it is simply the reality of how things are in the audiovisual field, you will never get Dolby or Fraunhofer or or motion picture expert group or creative to open up any of their proprietary IP so you will simply have to accept a feature deficit OR use a license other than GPL that tolerates linking with proprietary code.
It is a testament to how thoroughly and utterly open-source (and specifically copyleft) has won that people are completely unable to contemplate the possibility that some code simply cannot and should not be released under viral copyleft licensing. And people can’t even consider other open licenses like BSD etc.
It’s literally not, it’s what AMD’s maintainers have said themselves?
> HDMI 2.1 is not available on Linux due to the HDMI Forum. See: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HDMI-Clo...
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417#note_83...
Like it literally does come down to the same thing as people say about nvidia: this is closed source and it’s not compatible with copyleft licensing. GPL can’t touch proprietary symbols any more than proprietary code can touch GPL symbols.
Nvidia can support it because they have a closed firmware and the symbols are buried in blobs. And that has its advantages too, like this situation!
If you can chase HDMI forum to open a minimal set of symbols, fine, and it sounds like AMD has been working on that. But there is a lot of closed IP in the graphics world that will simply never be opened and it’s unlikely that the closed driver will ever be opened up as a result (the open driver will be a rewrite without IP taint). Graphics IP is just not a world compatible with copyleft and they’re ok with that, if copyleft suffers consequences oh well, Linux is probably <1% of their revenue base.
Copyleft is fundamentally about inventing a new, joyfully communist codebase, not gluing proprietary code onto community code. That’s why it’s GPL and not BSD - Nvidia’s license or hdmi forum’s license is not a problem on FreeBSD! And in this case you simply must invent your own 48gbps display standard, but with hookers and blow, and then drive sufficient adoption in the market, just as Linux had to do for software. Or someone already did that and it’s called DisplayPort.
But hdmi is proprietary license and you can’t use it unless and until they relicense to something GPL compatible. That’s the price of the Linux kernel, is it delivering some value here that BSD or minix wouldn’t for you?
Again though it is simply the reality of how things are in the audiovisual field, you will never get Dolby or Fraunhofer or or motion picture expert group or creative to open up any of their proprietary IP so you will simply have to accept a feature deficit OR use a license other than GPL that tolerates linking with proprietary code.
It is a testament to how thoroughly and utterly open-source (and specifically copyleft) has won that people are completely unable to contemplate the possibility that some code simply cannot and should not be released under viral copyleft licensing. And people can’t even consider other open licenses like BSD etc.