What’s the chance of NVIDIA someday making the CUDA SDK fully open source under GPL/LGPL for non-commercial use? Maybe even making it a SourceForge.net project, (like Intel, CyberLink, and even Microsoft done for a few of their SDKs)? NVIDIA® Corporation could still own and project manage a such project on SourceForge.net or their own website but other independent and hobby developers should be able volunteer (free workers, hehe) if they can prove their skill by submitting patches and/or bug-fixes. Project like that really draw in a big community, people can help writting manuals (online wiki), you could then also use code from other GPGPU programming projects/resources if they too are licenced under GPL/LGPL.
…is that just wishfull thinking? :rolleyes:
PS! I think GPGPU (General-Purpose Computation on GPU) will become a huge deal within only a year or so!
I’d like an answer to this question. I’m considering various high performance computing platforms: AMD/ATI CTM, NVIDIA CUDA and IBM Cell, both CTM and Cell have an open source development environment. Why is NVIDIA keeping the source closed?
CTM’s SourceForge project continues to show 0 files for download, so I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison.
Asking for the drivers or the driver <-> card interface to be open-sourced is, I suspect, futile. There’s a long history of gfx companies not revealing details about their drivers, probably to protect trade secrets as well as IP that they have licensed that they don’t have the right to open up themselves even if they wanted to.
Some more realistic targets for openness/open source:
Not just a Open64 compiler but buildable sources - NVIDIA seems to be following Pathscale’s practice of releasing the source tree but not the upper level Makefiles or any build instructions. I suppose this is more than coincidence, as NV probably has the same Makefiles. The ideal outcome would be a merge with the Open64 project but in the interim, a build procedure that can work with the Open64 Makefiles would be much appreciated.
It’s understood that a flat source code release is in keeping with the letter of the GPL, but releasing a working build procedure is a little closer to the spirit of the GPL, for what it’s worth.
ptxas?
Raised in a different thread - too much of a new front being opened here. :-)
BUMP! AMD/ATI has now put some presure on NVIDIA by going out an publicly announced that AMD/ATI will from now on officialy do all it can to support the open source community in regards to open source device drivers, API, and SDK. AMD/ATI has begun this campaign by given out full specification (without NDA) for ATI R500 GPUs and above to the X.org driver developers, (and as I understand it they will also soon release the specifications for the R600 media decoder).
“John Bridgman and Matthew Tippett are announcing AMD’s open source plans, specifications without NDA. 2D very soon, 3D coming when the legal issues have been taken care of. Specs for the r3xx core will probably be coming later on down the track.”
it might take 6-months to a year before end-users see the big difference this will make but there is no doubt that soon both the open source and closed source binary drivers for AMD/ATI graphics chips will soon be better than todays NVIDIA respective device drivers.
