Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues.

  • who@feddit.org
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    17 hours ago

    the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1.

          • shani66@ani.social
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            3 hours ago

            Hey now, organized crime usually has an element of giving back to the community, it’s much more ethical than this!

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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            4 hours ago

            The HDMI Forum blocks open source implementations of their spec. They want to keep it closed source so they can charge whatever they want to use their standards.

            Big content creators (Disney, Netflix, etc) want TV manufacturers to keep using HDMI because the standard includes a DRM protocol.

        • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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          15 hours ago

          And they’re allowed to. But this is not that.

          …the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.

    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      How, though? I’m not terribly knowledgeable about the law, but I know interoperability is one of the major sources of exceptions to copyright protection, and the whole Google vs Oracle saga would imply there’s nothing illegal about making your own implementation of a standard without permission.

      • azuth@sh.itjust.works
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        8 hours ago

        AMD is a member of the HDMI consortium and is probably bound by private agreements to not make open source drivers without permission from the consortium. They did try to get them to budge but they didn’t.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        Copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret laws are all entirely different and have almost nothing to do with each other (don’t be fooled by the property-rights-hating shysters who try to gaslight you into lumping them all as “intellectual property[sic]”).

        Trademarks and patents don’t have the same kinds of interoperability exceptions that copyright does, and you can’t claim to “support HDMI™” without licensing rights to those in addition to whatever copyrighted code you might need for the software side of the implementation.

        • Decq@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          So what stops them from supporting HDMI™ 2.1 but just not call it that? As long as they create the code in a clean room scenario I don’t see how they could be liable for damages? Although I assume it has something to with DRM… And then you get into the weeds of the terrible cyber security laws…