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

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:43:15AM -0800, Kendall Bennett wrote: 
> There is actually a really good reason for this. The hardware vendors 
> like ATI listened to the Open Source community and made a genuine attempt 
> at fitting into the Open Source model. The paid to have Open Source 
> drivers developed for the Linux platform (full 3D drivers, not just 2D 
> ones) and has the full source code released to the community. They also 
> made the specs for that generation of hardware available for the Open 
> Source community as well. What did they get in return? A bunch of free 
> software zealots constantly complaining that "this doesn't work" or 
> "please add this feature" or "I think you should be doing this". Their 
> responses was "you have the source and specs now, go and do it 
> yourself!". In the end they essentially had almost nobody in the Linux 
> community working on fixing bugs and enhancing the drivers that they had 
> made an effort to release, so when it came to the next generation of 
> chips, they decided to change their policy. If they were going to have to 
> fix the bugs and do all the code maintenance themselves anyway, then why 
> the hell should they release source code and specs! Hence ATI's latest 
> drivers are like NVIDIA's, in that they are closed source and ATI solely 
> is responsible for fixing bugs and doing enhancements.
> 

If that is really how ATI viewed the situation, someone very misguided
must have set their expectations.

These were the wrong reasons to do open source drivers, and completely
broken expectations for what would happen when open sourcing a
codebase. You don't just throw out some code and then it's magically
developed for you. It does not work that way.

Havoc