[beebeepka]

Are they "incredibly proprietary" compared to the competition? Clearly they aren't. Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional markets. Even going to the extent of gimping performance hardware through drivers on more than one occasion.

That said, I think AMD isn't really competing with Nvidia. Sure, their R&D budget is smallish but it feels like they're somewhat fine with the current status quo.

[paulmd]

> Nvidia offers blobs in both consumer and professional markets

So does AMD.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...

And while they have an open version of the userland, it's also missing features compared to the proprietary one, etc.

Besides, in the end it truly hardly matters whether the firmware is loaded at runtime or lives in updateable flash. It's still not "your PC" in the Stallman sense either way, it's been tivoized regardless of whether firmware is injected at runtime or during assembly. You cannot load unsigned firmware on AMD anymore either, firmware signing started with Vega (iirc) and checksums now cover almost all of the card configuration similar to NVIDIA.

Firmware is also the only way to get proper HDMI support... which is why AMD still does not support HDMI 2.1 on linux. HDMI Forum will not license the spec openly and implementations must contain blobs or omit those features.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1417

[beebeepka]

Hey, I am not white knighting for AMD here. For all we know, they could only have been pursuing open standards because they've been forced to, as the underdog.

Can we really assign blame to them specifically for not fighting the hdmi forum on our behalf?