I doubt that IMG will now try to bullshit us with the inane patent excuse.
It's not inane. Their fear is a natural consequence of mixing ludicrous patent systems with cutthroat industry politics.
Most GPU vendors don't have massive patent war chests of their own. They have a lot to lose by exposing their implementations, because of course they all infringe on various patents held by other vendors. Any program longer than hello.c is likely to infringe on various patents. When there's money at stake, the incentives all point towards keeping the driver sources private.
It is not other vendors that you need to be worried about. For example, when joining Khronos (OpenGL, GLES and others) you get royalty free permission to use any technology in Khronos' specifications and you, as a vendor, have to offer your tech to other Khronos members for free. I wasn't involved in the DirectX side of things but I imagine Microsoft operate a similar IP framework. There is no practical way to be a GPU vendor today and hoard your IP.
Patent trolls though. A different story. In 5 years we were sued twice (that I know of) by trolls. On both occasions the trolls had some trivial enhancement to a well known technique. I imagine they are operating a mud slinging operation where eventually something sticks. Once it does then either (1) the cost of licensing this 'new' tech is priced less than legal costs or (2) the troll is looking for testimony from some respected entity that the tech is innovative which gives them validation to go after the next biggest vendor up the chain.
> Most GPU vendors don't have massive patent war chests of their own.
The largest by marketshare, nVidia and ATI (by belonging to AMD) certainly have a sh.tload of patents. Do correct me, but aren't IMG/PowerVR and nVidia holding the majority of the mobile GPU market share anyways?
NVidia is a minor player in the non-laptop mobile space. PowerVR and Qualcomm have the most popular GPUs, followed by Vivante and ARM's Mali as the second tier. NVidia's mobile GPUs are only used in their own SoCs, and the Tegra has never been that successful.
Sorry, but it really just does not work that way in the patent world (copyright is a different story, but they have never made the claim they are worried about copyright infringement).
I can't even remember a case that started by someone looking at source code to figure out if their IP was being used.
It's not inane. Their fear is a natural consequence of mixing ludicrous patent systems with cutthroat industry politics.
Most GPU vendors don't have massive patent war chests of their own. They have a lot to lose by exposing their implementations, because of course they all infringe on various patents held by other vendors. Any program longer than hello.c is likely to infringe on various patents. When there's money at stake, the incentives all point towards keeping the driver sources private.