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Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

codyho.dev

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Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#261

Post by realusername »

charcircuit wrote: post #254
realusername wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA. It doesn't, this is what Nintendo claimed but it's false. The community learned their lessons from the Wii emulation era and you are supposed to bring your own keys, nothing is included in the emulator. And yes, they also wrote this lie on their DMCA takedown against Suyu (which also doesn't have any key…

>you are supposed to bring your own keys Just because you have to bring your own keys that doesn't make it not a circumvention measure.

There's no "circumvention mesure" in there, the emulator can only read unencrypted games by default. You won't find anything in the source code, if the game is encrypted, it cannot read it.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#262

Post by ndriscoll »

otterley wrote: post #260
ndriscoll wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I think it would change things. You think I haven't considered that? But I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire instead of gatekeeping what already exists, and if the law banned this one-sided gatekeeping. The goal of all people should be to build lasting wealth for the next generation to inherit, not to hoard what is naturally infinite. Plumbers…

> I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire That's the entire point of copyright -- to incentivize this work by conveying ownership to those who produce such software. Without ownership, others would be free to take it and give you nothing. The world doesn't work for free. I doubt you do, either.

That's the ostensible point, and I think does the job extremely poorly, and is often if not usually counterproductive. Without payment, there'd be nothing to take, since as you say, the world doesn't work for free.

Software either has some functional purpose, so people will pay to see its creation (e.g. device drivers; no one will buy your hardware if there's no software for it to do anything), or it exists as e.g. art, in which case patronage avoids the damage of copyright. Either way, if you want to incentivize creation, then you should want a system where payment is for creation, and where further creation (e.g. paying a different developer to modify it) is freely allowed. Copyright is a system where people pay to rent, so once it's created you can rest on your laurels forever unless someone undertakes the inefficiency of recreating the same thing for no reason before they can add to it.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#263

Post by userbinator »

otterley wrote: post #260
ndriscoll wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course I think it would change things. You think I haven't considered that? But I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire instead of gatekeeping what already exists, and if the law banned this one-sided gatekeeping. The goal of all people should be to build lasting wealth for the next generation to inherit, not to hoard what is naturally infinite. Plumbers…

> I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire That's the entire point of copyright -- to incentivize this work by conveying ownership to those who produce such software. Without ownership, others would be free to take it and give you nothing. The world doesn't work for free. I doubt you do, either.

others would be free to take it and give you nothing

And that's fine, because I'm being paid to provide a service, actual labour (which might admittedly involve prompting an LLM), but it's still doing something new. There's tons of people being paid to work on OSS, and much of which would still exist by volunteer effort alone.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#264

Post by otterley »

userbinator wrote: post #263
otterley wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire That's the entire point of copyright -- to incentivize this work by conveying ownership to those who produce such software. Without ownership, others would be free to take it and give you nothing. The world doesn't work for free. I doubt you do, either.

others would be free to take it and give you nothing And that's fine, because I'm being paid to provide a service, actual labour (which might admittedly involve prompting an LLM), but it's still doing something new. There's tons of people being paid to work on OSS, and much of which would still exist by volunteer effort alone.

> There's tons of people being paid to work on OSS, and much of which would still exist by volunteer effort alone.

Those people are largely working on OSS as a hobby or for clout, i.e., to kickstart their career; or, they're working on a loss leader that will (if history is any indication) eventually lead to a license rug pull when they find out GPL/BSD/MIT licenes aren't a path to riches.

I'll concede that hobby projects that have led to Linux, programming languages, etc. do provide valuable connective tissue to the world, but most of the stuff that appeals to the end user isn't OSS.

> I'm being paid to provide a service

If you're like most of us, you're likely being paid to provide a service that depends on copyright as a foundation. Ask your company's lawyer their opinion on what the company would do if your work wasn't protected by it, or if someone broke into your company's source code repos and stole it.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#265

Post by otterley »

ndriscoll wrote: post #262
otterley wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also think society would be a better place if we worked to produce new software that people desire That's the entire point of copyright -- to incentivize this work by conveying ownership to those who produce such software. Without ownership, others would be free to take it and give you nothing. The world doesn't work for free. I doubt you do, either.

That's the ostensible point, and I think does the job extremely poorly, and is often if not usually counterproductive. Without payment, there'd be nothing to take, since as you say, the world doesn't work for free. Software either has some functional purpose, so people will pay to see its creation (e.g. device drivers; no one will buy your hardware if there's no software for it to do anything), or it exists as e.g. a…

> if you want to incentivize creation, then you should want a system where payment is for creation, and where further creation (e.g. paying a different developer to modify it) is freely allowed.

Why is that? I would think that the possibility of exclusivity over derivative works is an even greater incentive to creation.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#266

Post by pclowes »

preisschild wrote: post #251
pclowes wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone care about either of these things in a negative sense? Isn’t that just saying “he uses modern tools and has subject matter expertise”?

Because the original data the model is trained on is under copyright you can't include the output in a copyleft codebase. See DCO. You cant sign off on you having permission to license the code when you stole it. Many open source contributors like copyleft, but with illegal LLM copyright-washing many people disrespect the terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi...

Any court case involving an LLM you can point to where LLM output violated copyright AND that was held up in court?

General thought here is the entire economy is all in on a bet that that would never be enforced and I am willing to bet we would rather change the law than destroy the economy…

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#267

Post by littlecranky67 »

mitxela wrote: post #216
littlecranky67 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Especially since even a tainted GPU driver (tainted as in, used former Apple Engineer knowledge) is usefull as we just throw another LLM onto it and tell it "rewrite in rust" and get an untainted version of it (at least that is the current judicial state, and the bigtech argues in this direction).

An AI doesn't magically add copyright but it also doesn't magically remove copyright except via diffusion of training data. It does not remove copyright from its input. Malus was a parody. If you machine-translate something from one language to another, copyright is retained no matter how sophisticated the translator is.

That remains to be seen (in court). So far you can take any software project written in programming lang $X and have the AI convert it to $Y. Yes, you could say derived work, but it currently impossible to determine if it was rewritten by a human or AI. And there is the point at which every human violates copyright by building on those who came before him - i.e. if I write code in $X, is the inventor of programming language $X entitled to my code - clearly I took his work and built on it. Today the courts say no, this would not be derived work - but it is hard to draw a strict line what is.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#268

Post by ndriscoll »

otterley wrote: post #265
ndriscoll wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the ostensible point, and I think does the job extremely poorly, and is often if not usually counterproductive. Without payment, there'd be nothing to take, since as you say, the world doesn't work for free. Software either has some functional purpose, so people will pay to see its creation (e.g. device drivers; no one will buy your hardware if there's no software for it to do anything), or it exists as e.g. a…

> if you want to incentivize creation, then you should want a system where payment is for creation, and where further creation (e.g. paying a different developer to modify it) is freely allowed. Why is that? I would think that the possibility of exclusivity over derivative works is an even greater incentive to creation.

And yet we have proof right in front of us that e.g. Apple will not port their GPU drivers to Linux, and people had to reverse engineer it, so clearly the evidence says it does not create that incentive. In fact, copyright law for software is quite frequently used to manipulate and control appliance owners or end-users, even when the software itself is not really "the point" of the thing (e.g. putting ads and spyware in cars or locking out the ability of the owner to use their heated seats).

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#269

Post by otterley »

ndriscoll wrote: post #268
otterley wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you want to incentivize creation, then you should want a system where payment is for creation, and where further creation (e.g. paying a different developer to modify it) is freely allowed. Why is that? I would think that the possibility of exclusivity over derivative works is an even greater incentive to creation.

And yet we have proof right in front of us that e.g. Apple will not port their GPU drivers to Linux, and people had to reverse engineer it, so clearly the evidence says it does not create that incentive. In fact, copyright law for software is quite frequently used to manipulate and control appliance owners or end-users, even when the software itself is not really "the point" of the thing (e.g. putting ads and spyware…

> And yet we have proof right in front of us that e.g. Apple will not port their GPU drivers to Linux, and people had to reverse engineer it, so clearly the evidence says it does not create that incentive

On the contrary, Apple engineers--paid professionals--wrote the driver to make MacOS work with the integrated GPU.

I don't know why you think not writing a driver for Linux is proof of anything, other than that Apple does not care one whit about Linux. They have no interest in that. They build integrated computer systems (hardware + software); to build them for Linux is, to them, an utter waste of resources.

> copyright law for software is quite frequently used to manipulate and control appliance owners or end-users, even when the software itself is not really "the point" of the thing

That's right. Builders of things get control over what they build. That control is designed to maximize profit, which is a strong motivator for building novel and useful things. If you don't like what they're building, buy something else, or build something better! That's how capitalism is supposed to work.

Re: Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

#270

Post by ndriscoll »

otterley wrote: post #269
ndriscoll wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we have proof right in front of us that e.g. Apple will not port their GPU drivers to Linux, and people had to reverse engineer it, so clearly the evidence says it does not create that incentive. In fact, copyright law for software is quite frequently used to manipulate and control appliance owners or end-users, even when the software itself is not really "the point" of the thing (e.g. putting ads and spyware…

> And yet we have proof right in front of us that e.g. Apple will not port their GPU drivers to Linux, and people had to reverse engineer it, so clearly the evidence says it does not create that incentive On the contrary, Apple engineers--paid professionals--wrote the driver to make MacOS work with the integrated GPU. I don't know why you think not writing a driver for Linux is proof of anything, other than that Appl…

Okay, but nobody can pay a random software engineer to go take the Apple driver's code and use it to make a working Linux driver that they can use on the hardware they purchased. So Apple's monopoly on their source code is not incentivizing any creation (they had to write it anyway to make the hardware useful), and is in fact disincentivizing it (now if someone wants e.g. a Linux or Windows driver, they need to undertake the previously monumental task of also reverse engineering the hardware, which is much more difficult than the original software creation).

And product tying (requiring that if you want to buy Apple's hardware you must also use their software) is an anti-competitive practice that harms society, which is why I oppose it. The world is a better place when you can plug your Dell monitor into your Apple computer and it just works. It's also a better place when you can buy your operating system from Canonical if you'd like to run on your Apple computer. It means we all have more choice. Even if Apple doesn't want to have any part in making that work, we should say they have to release the necessary information to let you pay someone else to do it if you'd like, or at least let people re-use whatever they do get from Apple to make it work (e.g. look at what Apple's binary code does). As I said, it's a basic consumer protection requirement for the 21st century where everything has software now.

Society gains literally nothing from letting them have a monopoly on software necessary for their hardware to run, so why give it to them?

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