OpenPCI Radeon driver

[DJS]

Hello,

It is just the copy of my post on amigaworld.net:


Two weeks ago I read on a1k.org that two people - MastaTabs and Ratte -- made available OpenPCI driver for the Radeon gfx cards.

I was a bit surprised that they made a driver for exactly the same ATI chipsets, which are just supported by Elbox Radeon driver. There are so many other gfx cards around...

I looked into the openpci driver code to check the name of its author but found that there isn't any copyright info inside. Nobody signed this driver. It seemed to me a little suspicious because developers who spend many weeks or months on such a project usually sign their code.

I sent the archive with this driver to Pawel Stypula - author of the Elbox driver for the Radeon gfx cards. He is a very busy man but promised to make a look into it as soon as has a moment of a spare time.

I just received his response. He is totally shocked. More than 90% of our Radeon related code was directly copied from our Radeon.card driver (ver. 2.12 from 09 Sep 2010) to the openpci Radeon.card driver. Almost all functions were taken from our driver and inserted by simple "copy and past" to this "new" driver. Many of the procedures were taken without changing even single line of the code. The only actual change that has been made in the code of functions taken from our driver was removing these parts of code, which are related to Mediators for A1200.

The blocks of the code taken from our driver without altering even one byte in them are so big as several hundreds of processor opcodes! There are over a dozen of such big directly copied blocks of code. The biggest one has 637 assembler lines (1898 bytes of the driver code)!
 
I'm really surprised that someone decided to make an almost 1:1 copy of our code, inserted it as an essential part of his driver and announced it as his work.

The development of our Radeon driver took months of work in 2007 and 2008. This was a first support for any ATI Radeon gfx cards in Classic Amigas. There were many undocumented Radeon issues which had to be solved in the code of this driver. Solving them required many time and hard work.

Nobody wants their work being stolen, we too. If somebody wants to use our code he should contact us for the license. Using our copyrighted code without our permission is illegal.

The driver released by MastaTabs and Ratte is clearly illegal as containing the stolen code.

Best regards,
Darek Smietana
ELBOX COMPUTER

Postscriptum:
It is just the removal of checks on which Mediator (A1200 or ZIII Amiga) and in what mode (MMU / NOMMU) driver is working what results in the slight increase in speed tests measured by P96speed.

[DJS]

statement:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?p=585102

Dear MastaTabs & Ratte,

The fact that many Mediator drivers are available for downloads at our website has nothing to do with their commercial status. In the archive enclosing our Radeon.card driver there is a disclaimer which clearly informs that our driver is a commercial software and is copyrighted.

As in the code of the OpenPCI Radeon.card driver there are many, many big fragments of code copied/stolen 1:1 from our driver the OpenPCI driver is illegal and as such should be immediately removed from every places.

It is completely unimportant if you sell this illegal software or you give it away for free. Our Radeon.card driver was written for Mediators  and no one contacted us for licensing its code to any other hardware solution.

Imagine what would happen to you if you do the same with any software which works with Apple computers only. If you copy big fragments of Apple copyrighted code, remove protection (which join the code with Apple computers hardware) and you distribute such code for free for users of any PC computers...

Your suggestions that we based the Radeon initialization code on the Linux source is completely wrong. This code was written by Pawel Stypula long time before ATI released the AtomBIOS parser source code. The first working version of the code for initialization the Radeon gfx card we have had in November 2004. This code was firstly working on the Radeon 9250 AGP card installed in the Dragon 1200 busboard. We still have the sources of our earliest versions of the Radeon.card.The Radeon initialization procedures we based on the reverse engineering of x86 BIOSes of the Radeon cards - it was really hard work.
 
From the beginning the code of our Radeon.card driver has been written in the 68k/Coldfire assembler. Not a single line of this code is written in C+.

As in the OpenPCI Radeon.card driver the main part of initialization procedure (the whole AtomBIOS parser) is the exact copy byte-by-byte (over 600 assembler lines of code) taken from our driver do not lie that you based it on any other source than our driver. This code is simply stolen as many, many other parts from our driver code.

Our Radeon.card driver surely includes the parts of code of Voodoo.card driver as a framework. The parts of our Voodoo.card driver, which was the first (released in November 2000) driver for Voodoo3 gfx cards working with the P96 gfx system.

Please remove immediately your illegal driver from any downloads.

Best regards,

Darek Smietana
ELBOX COMPUTER