Re:Raspberry Pi GPU Driver Turns Out To Be a Shim
by mikeash on Thursday October 25, 2012 @01:21PM
(#4698465)
There's a certain implied responsibility that comes with releasing source. While the community is clearly better off with any sort of source release than with none, their reputation could still take a hit if the source release has problems like these.
Litigation and IP ownership may be reasons enough, I like not to get into details there, but:
- Unbuildable - great, release it, someone will either pick it up and correct it, or they will not. Right now they're guaranteeing that noone will.
- Undocumented - same as above; also I've never seen a proper, up to date, useful documentation without errors. If you open the code, you may get some improvements and current documentation may be actually useful. Otherwise we have nothing.
- Unsafe - that's pretty much the same situation as currently used custom android roms, firmware which is not cryptographicly signed, and many things that talk to SOCs with power management. If you corrupt the firmware in some way, or configure chips for different voltage than expected bad things will happen. This is not specific to GPUs.