Bonum Certa Men Certa

AMD and Novell: Kisses Then Tears

Graphics card
Friction in the boards



According to this message from Wednesday, Compiz suffers from a developers vacuum. People move on to forks of this Novell project, notably Compiz-Fusion. This new comment from LinuxToday is about "Novell's role" and it asks, "Could devs be moving to a different home because of the Microsoft factor?"



It's worth remembering that Compiz predates Novell's patent deal with Microsoft. If there is any substance to the argument above, this would not be the first example where developers are leaving Novell because of the Novell/Microsoft patent deal. This actually leads to a different and older story; Novell betrayed partners like Astrum [1, 2, 3] and they got sued for it too, but what about the relationship with AMD?

There are those who insist that hardware acceleration is an area where Novell contributes a lot, but had it not been Novell, it probably would have been more of Red Hat.

“AMD was close to going through with the canning its Novell contract, which would have effectively spelled the death of RadeonHD.”One known example of contribution is the AMD-Novell relationship. But Novell angered AMD in a major way some time ago , despite the fact that AMD and Novell had enjoyed a good relation, as demonstrated publicly in LinuxWorld 2007. It was quite an affair and several press releases came out at the time (this did not recur in LinuxWorld 2008). AMD and Novell were a good match; both were abused by convicted monopolists.

What few people know is that AMD almost cut Novell off on their RadeonHD contract. AMD was getting especially steamed over RadeonHD avoiding AtomBIOS. The RadeonHD developers were not entirely aware of this at the time, and maybe they still don't know.

A senior AMD official wrote: "And to think I spent the last four months of my life trying to save their sorry asses. What a fool I was. [...] it was scheduled to be finished 5 weeks ago. [...] I escalated high and hard within Novell's senior management." It was the Novell developers who were causing the issues, whereas Novell's management was not the one trying to knock AMD over AtomBIOS. AMD was paying Novell to write a driver to use AtomBIOS, but Novell continued going forward bashing AtomBIOS and avoiding it. The real reason, simply put, was that AtomBIOS is written horribly, or that's how Novell viewed it anyway. The developers said it was their intention all along to hard-code it with no AtomBIOS.

AMD was close to going through with the canning its Novell contract, which would have effectively spelled the death of RadeonHD.

Were the specs sufficient for anyone else to take over? Hypothetically speaking, for some parts, yes. But for every document that's publicly available, there are at least three times as many NDA documents than Novell had. However, if they had canned RadeonHD, it's reasonable to suspect that they would have steered their resources towards Red Hat as they already do for the -ati driver.

NDAs are used all the time when they release documentation that has yet to be sanitised and for documentation and hardware on unreleased products. The danger with Novell is one that revolves around control. It seems like AMD clings on to control. They don't want the community to leapfrog its own development.

Those NDAs were part of this arrangement and are in some sense akin to what Microsoft arranged with Novell. Microsoft makes source code visible, but only Novell can use it. This leads to a liability path and there's also the issue of Linux (or broadly speaking, the Free Desktop) depending on Novell's existence. In a sense, NDAs, just like RAND and software patents, are inherently incompatible with the spirit and goals of the GNU project.

Another related example of control would be Maemo versus the iPhone. In the former case, Nokia lost control of its direction and its equipment, at least in some sense. DRM and all that antifeature fluff wouldn't be properly enforced; On the contrary -- looking at the latter -- Apple uses "security" as a codeword for control. It's prepared to brick iPhones that leap out of its hands (jail-breaking).

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete
 
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Links 26/10/2025: Microsoft Spies on Gamers, Open Transport Community Conference
Links for the day
Links 26/10/2025: LLM Slop / Plagiarism Programs Continue to Disappoint, CISA Layoffs Threaten Systems
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/10/2025: Gemsync and Joining the Small Web
Links for the day
India.com a Click-baiting, SEO-Spamming, Slopfarming Heap
They do this almost every day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 25, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 25, 2025
Without XBox Consoles, XBox is No More, It's Just a Brand (More Rumours of Microsoft Ending XBox, Then Laying Off Lots of Staff)
All signs indicate that Microsoft wants to "exit" the XBox business (not brand), but it does not want to publicly admit this as it would alarm staff and shareholders
Gemini Links 25/10/2025: Portugal, Midnightpub, and "Tech Right Admins"
Links for the day
Almost 2026 Already (When We Turn Twenty)
In just over a year the site will turn 20
When "Sponsored Feature" in The Register MS Means Ponzi Scheme Promotion From the Communist Party of China (CPC)
the promotion of a financial scam
Week of EPO Leaks: Workers of the EPO Are Getting a Pay Cut While Prices Rise Fast
More to come in the next few days
Microsoft is Finally Giving Up on XBox, The Chief Says the Grapes Are Sour Anyway
Microsoft loses hundreds of dollars on each XBox that it sells
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Various Slopfarms Propped up by Google News
Why can't Google News do better than this?
Links 25/10/2025: Two New Smokescreens for Scam Altman and ‘TikTok USA’ Remains in Limbo
Links for the day
Bad faith: can't change Debian Social Contract (DSC) without unanimous consent of every joint author
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Confirmed: Very Close Friend of Bill Gates and Microsoft's Biggest Patent Troll Nathan Myhrvold Flew the Lolita Express (a Gateway to Pedophilia), According to Bill Gates-Sponsored Seattle Times
There is no speculation or any "conspiracy theories" here;' those are verified facts
Gemini Links 25/10/2025: "The Highest Leader of The Global Civil Society Community", SSL Certificates Causing Bitrot
Links for the day
Links 25/10/2025: Target Layoffs and "Shutdown Sparks 85% Increase in US Government Cyberattacks"
Links for the day
"Big Data" Was a Big Lie
Remember "Big Data"? Remember "Data Scientists"...?
statCounter Has Been Broken for a Long Time
Considering the huge proportion of Web requests that come from LLM bots (more so this past year or two), statCounter may struggle to justify the operating costs
Techrights Anniversary Party on November 7th
Let us know if you need any accommodation-related arrangements
Trends That Must Alarm Microsoft and Mozilla
Expect Firefox to no longer be supported by various sites in the US
Why Microsoft Became the Layoffs Leader
The corporate media is projecting or signalling its own dishonesty when it tells us that Microsoft is a very "valuable" company while the data shows Microsoft is also a "market leader" in layoffs
Speaking for Ourselves and Letting the Facts Speak for Themselves
we've already published over 50,000 pages
For Second Time in a Day The Register MS Takes Money From Private Companies to Sell a Ponzi Scheme
Do not have empathy for those who have zero empathy towards you
IBM is Misleading IBM Shareholders
IBM is still all about vapourware and buzzwords
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 24, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, October 24, 2025