Re: "Drivers? We don't need no stinking..."

Let's see, now...

Alan Cox tactfully implies that a dearth of register-level documentation is
moot in a dearth of mentally competent programmers to use it.

David Wexelblat, wandering down his line of ancient databooks, ignores
current and future chips and seems to imply that any attempt at keeping up
with hardware is doomed.

Neither addresses my, uh, treatise on bloatware, which implies a problem with
future maintainability of code.

With the Wretched Offender's 'kdrive' as an example, perhaps it is possible
to prune the code.  As for chips, maybe I should replace my aging G400 and
300 MHz K6-2 with a 2 GHz CPU or two, and run dumb framebuffer mode; that was
Intel's suggestion, several years ago.

For the future of XFree86, then, my two main concerns are the same as for
certain other "large" Open Source projects:  ongoing hardware support, and
sustainability of the code base.  I have chronically parted company with the 
prevailing views on how to deal with both of these issues, throughout my 9 
years running Open Source systems:

  1. On hardware:  A lawsuit should have been pursued years ago, already.
     With the finding that Microsoft is an illegal monopoly, that would
     be much easier now.  The prevailing argument against this ignores the
     "reasonableness clause", such that the legal remedy cannot impose an
     unreasonable burden on the defendant in a suit.

  2. On the code:  Separate components are preferable to monolithic systems  
     (Linux does this, of course).  For each component, render a basic
     version extremely lean and mean, with more elaborate and ambitious 
     alternatives available as options, using separate but coordinated code
     bases (God help me if I ever have to put my code where my mouth is on
     this one, but I am serious).

I don't know what to say about the dearth of mentally competent programmers.


-- Jim Howard  <[email protected]>