alt Hacker NewsNo, the issue here is that the HDMI 2.1 NDA is so strict that releasing an open source implementation is forbidden no matter how much you pay them. AMD has access to the specs, they've implemented it in hardware and in their closed source Windows driver, but they're not allowed to add it to their open source Linux driver.
Nvidia does support HDMI 2.1 on Linux since their driver is closed source (but that causes its own problems). Maybe AMD could compromise by releasing a minimal binary blob which only exposes the HDMI 2.1 implementation and nothing else.
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And IIRC Intel has handled this by making their cards internally use DisplayPort then putting DisplayPort -> HDMI converters on the board.
What if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?
I wonder if the license dictates that you must use a specific language, or if they could ship that proprietary component in Javascript. My understanding is that well-written JS with a JIT runtime can be very close to native performance. Not only would that make fun of the forum's requirements, it would also provide transparency about what the proprietary module does on your system exactly
And what if they just do it anyway? What are they going to do, sue them? Make them scrub every git repository on the planet?
Can't we just leak the spec?
Anyone can then implement opensource driver based on that and distribute it freely, since NDA won't apply to them.
Would someone doing a clean room reverse engineering be permissible to then share would they built?
Nvidia's kernel driver is open source now [1], they just do the important HDMI bits in their closed source GSP firmware. Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest. AMD could do something similar, but it would require a hardware change on their side (the GSP was a new bit of hardware added in Turing Nvidia GPUs).
1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules