I moved from Nvidia to AMD on Manjaro. I use mesa driver but it's from mesa-nonfree because they moved patented part to a different repo to avoid lawsuits. I want the patented part because it's support for hardware encoders. Does that count as open-source or proprietary?

Quoting: cprnI moved from Nvidia to AMD on Manjaro. I use mesa driver but it's from mesa-nonfree because they moved patented part to a different repo to avoid lawsuits. I want the patented part because it's support for hardware encoders. Does that count as open-source or proprietary?

It still counts as open source, because it is :-)

It's just a Mesa build configuration option,

-D video-codecs=vc1dec,h264dec,h264enc,h265dec,h265enc

Those particular codecs couldn't be called "free software" though, if they are patent encumbered. Also, that only matters if your country cares what United States thinks. Not everybody subscribes to their corrupt patent system.

That's what happens when commercial entities take over a Linux distro. Their parent distro, Arch, that the vast majority of their packages are built from (verbatim PKGBUILDS, just month old builds usually) isn't doing that to Mesa.

P.S. I should say that for the purposes of the hardware survey, "open source" vs. "proprietary" means not using a proprietary driver from the vendor. So, for AMD, if you are using amdgpu/Mesa you are using the open source driver. If you are using AMD's "Radeon Software for Linux" (a.k.a. "Radeon Pro") you are using the proprietary driver.

Here's where it gets a bit confusing for AMD. The "Radeon Software for Linux" now has an open source kernel component that they also call amdgpu. ("AMDGPU All-Open") but the graphics libraries are proprietary. You will still refer to that as the "proprietary driver" for the GOL hardware info surveys.

By the same token, if someone were using Nouveau/Mesa (which they probably wouldn't be for gaming, it's just for example) for their Nvidia card they'd say they were using open source drivers.

Intel also has proprietary Linux graphics drivers, "Intel Arc Graphics" or some shite.

Last edited by Grogan on 19 September 2023 at 10:48 pm UTC

Quoting: GroganYou will still refer to that as the "proprietary driver" for the GOL hardware info surveys.

Lord Grogan has spoken. You will obey.

Maybe there should be a tooltip next to the driver question in the survey...? Because I get it wrong the first time so who knows how many people did - it became tricky over last few years.

Quoting: damarrin

Quoting: GroganYou will still refer to that as the "proprietary driver" for the GOL hardware info surveys.

Lord Grogan has spoken. You will obey.

Yes, I should have used a contraction. "you'll still refer..." or you'd. Used like that it's not authoritative (more like a figure of speech)

Quoting: cprnMaybe there should be a tooltip next to the driver question in the survey...? Because I get it wrong the first time so who knows how many people did - it became tricky over last few years.

For the Mesa thing, all you knew was that Manjaro didn't enable the video acceleration codecs and someone created a package and called it non-free.

However, the only change to Mesa is that those codecs are disabled by default. Before that relatively recent change, those same codecs were enabled. It simply changed to opt-in.

What it affects is h.264 (AVC) and h.265 (HEVC) video hardware acceleration using OpenGL video, vdpau and vaapi. Both decoding and encoding. The videos will still play, but using software decoding (CPU) which can have tearing and micro-stuttering etc. with any processing latency.

Now, nobody has ever been bothered by these patents, but Mesa changing it to opt-out, making you enable them, shifts the onus to the distributor. Commercial ones don't like that. Community, non-profits don't care because good luck weaponizing those patents against what are essentially charities.

Something Manjaro COULD do is simply enable acceleration for playback (dec) but then transcoding (conversion on the fly) would suffer without accelerated encoding. There's less chance of getting sued for decoding things, because of fair use for interoperability (but that doesn't mean it's free and clear).

The problem with software patents is of course that they lock up ideas so nobody else can use them without royalties or conditions (e.g. they can all but refuse to license it to you). You can write your own code that has absolutely nothing to do with anybody else's, and as soon as your product starts getting $ucce$$ful, you can get hit with patent trolls. It's not even a requirement that patents are advertised, they can be "submarine" patents that nobody knows about.

Last edited by Grogan on 20 September 2023 at 5:07 pm UTC

Quoting: Grogan

Quoting: damarrin

Quoting: GroganYou will still refer to that as the "proprietary driver" for the GOL hardware info surveys.

Lord Grogan has spoken. You will obey.

Yes, I should have used a contraction. "you'll still refer..." or you'd. Used like that it's not authoritative (more like a figure of speech)

I just thought it was funny.

Quoting: damarrinI just thought it was funny.

Well, I figured you were joking but that "you will..." language is actually something I don't like and would not have done it on purpose. I've known people who spoke like that, Eastern Europeans, and it's no mistake. My answer to that is "oh, I will, will I?" lol

Coincidentally, that just happens to be a thing with me. In general, authoritative speech is a trigger for me... I need to show that person just how little authority they have :-)

Quoting: Grogan

Quoting: damarrinI just thought it was funny.

Well, I figured you were joking but that "you will..." language is actually something I don't like and would not have done it on purpose. I've known people who spoke like that, Eastern Europeans, and it's no mistake. My answer to that is "oh, I will, will I?" lol

Coincidentally, that just happens to be a thing with me. In general, authoritative speech is a trigger for me... I need to show that person just how little authority they have :-)

You will switch to Windows, you will conform to the system and you WILL do as we say.

Failure to comply is not an option, any and all attempts to rebel against such authoritative decisions will result in swift action against you.




(This is obviously messing about and not being serious )

Quoting: BlackBloodRum(This is obviously messing about and not being serious )

That's good, I'm not like that. It's just that the original joke pointed out my mistake, that I took more seriously :-)