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

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Kendall Bennett wrote:

> Sven Luther <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > > Vote with your dollars. If you are committed to the Open Source-only path,
> > > the don't by hardware from vendors that don't release docs. This has worked
> > > in the past, rarely.
> >
> > Well, but not these days anymore, what would you end buying ?
> > Nvidia is out, matrox was giving docs in the past, but with the new
> > hardware (parhelia), i think there are not so open anymore, true,
> > who would buy a parhelia, but still. ATI does release docs, but
> > they don't release all of them too, especially in the Video domain.
> > I don't really know about the others, but none release docs without
> > you signing an NDA (BTW, are all the docs you offered NDA clean ?),
> > and anyway, often you cannot even buy their hardware.
>
> 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.

You are wrong on two counts:

       1. There are quite a few people knowledgable about ATI hardware

       2. ATI does provide documentation - which, in my opinion, has
          improved a lot. They have also switched their SDK to be
          Linux based (and not DOS/Watcom)

Their binary drivers appear to be compiled versions of the SDK - though I
am not certain abou this.

                        best

                           Vladimir Dergachev