EFA11

Quote: So I think the licensee issue may be a red herring or a convenient legal justification since nvidia surely wants to force the replacement of voodoo with nvidia tech while they own the market...simplest explanation makes the most sense to me. I agree, NVIDIA certainly wants to push its own technology, and can you blame them? 3dfx in their haste to leave so quickly "should" have worked out all the red tape with the source long before they decided to eat their young and curl up and die, but they didn't. 3dfx Wasn't concerned enough to think about the people, and why should anyone else. Some tend to forget, NVIDIA and MS did not kill 3dfx. 3dfx killed 3dfx.

Quote: EFA11 that is wrong I had min talk with Keith Galocy who use to be 3dfx Interactive, Developer Manager and I min reply from Andrew Fear I can sure part of what your say is wrong. Only one card I know that would be ture a Voodoo Rush the 2D was made by a diff a companies. The correspondences I had were after the ex-3dfx guys released the last couple sets of drivers. The topic was V3/V5 driver source code, and the above post is what I was told during discussions about the source code being open sourced. Either way, I fail to see any official driver support being offered from 3dfx or NVIDIA anyway. There is a 3rd party that is working on its own drivers for Voodoo cards, Kendall Bennett (SciTech Software - Director of Engineering) has confirmed they are working towards making in-house drivers "from scratch", when he contacted me looking for information. This has yet to be completed (maybe yet to be started). This could lead the way to XP Driver support (just guessing here, I'm not sure what OS's they would offer these drivers for) if they do complete their goals.

Quote: The entire point is it would not have cost anything for nvidia to pass the code over to MS so that millions of potential nvidia customers would be happy and not harbor angst toward them for not being the great company it could be. Cost is not the issue, 3dfx had signed NDA's to several other companies for parts of 3dfx driver source code. 3dfx didnt not own all of the copyrights to the code. NVIDIA can not release the source without permissions from the other companies. That is why the source was and will be never available to anyone. This was explained to me by a 3dfx driver developer a while back. NVIDIA ownes the source but not all the copyrights to the code in it. If they were to "pass the code" they would be guilty of copyright infringement and end up in "legal hot water".