Well, there's that, and the fact that China is notorious for reverse engineering, and basically just stealing the technology and making their own knock-offs. I don't blame Nvidia for not giving them the source code.
Many experts have shown that hardware specs which are sufficient for writing drivers are entirely useless for making hardware, to someone already versed in the field.
I read/heard/imagined(?) that the reason GPU vendors weren't willing to hand over their source was due to a proportion of their performance being software based. Which then a competitor could also implement.
The other big problem is lawsuit exposure. Given the current state of the patent system it's certain that nVidia drivers infringe on someone's patents.
Closed source drivers make it more difficult for patent owners to check, and launching a lawsuit without evidence of infringement is very expensive.
But these code bases aren't nearly large enough for it to be a problem for a reasonably sized team armed with decent tools to disassemble and analyze them if the goal is to figure out the techniques used. It might be their reason, but if so it's a damn stupid reason.
If one has enough info about nvidia hardware in order to make a driver for nvidia hardware, the same info is not enough to make your own nvidia hardware clones.
You sure about that? Read up about ghost-shifts in semiconductor fabs. Bunnie tells a bit of the tale in his story about counterfeit SD cards:
"Very low serial numbers, like very low MAC ID addresses, are a hallmark of the “ghost shift”, i.e. the shift that happens very late at night when a rouge worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off the books"
If you can run the hardware manufacturing off the books, I don't see how access to the driver source code would help. You would just ship the official binaries.
Which continues to moot the relevant point: Nvidia are withholding necessary software specs which not only aren't useful in reengineering their hardware, but which fail to protect against fully independent attacks (ghost shift manufacture) which at least allow duplication of current physical product if not producing a superior hardware product.
If reverse engineering is a crime, then you can probably say the same thing about the whole Linux community, and how they are "stealing" Microsoft and Apple's innovations.
Who said it was a crime? Just that a company might not want to give away it's source code because they don't want to make it easier for another company to make knock offs.
This has been a big issue for companies dealing with China, you sell your product their for awhile, until they can reverse it (or even hack your servers for info) and make their own.
In this case, the legality wasn't brought up, just the motivations for one company not sharing with another.
