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

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, James Arthur wrote:

> On Wednesday 26 March 2003 21:01, Sven Luther wrote:
> > What did they get in return ? I bought a Radeon 9000 for my spare box,
> > which i would _not_ have bought if there was no open source drivers. And
> > the fact that most DRI developpment is done on ATI hardware, is a big
> > plus for them, i guess most people buying video hardware for a linux box
> > (and thinking about 3D) will know this and buy their card.
>
> No offence, but one Radeon 9000 isn't going to make much difference to ATI.
>
> Having said that, I bought a Radeon 7500 for precisely the same reason, and
> regretted it ever since. In future I'll be buying a graphics card where the
> drivers are fully supported and sure to work, which probably means the
> drivers will be closed source and supported by the vendor; but so long as it
> works, I don't really care. I'm a great believer in "it should just work" and
> I think a lot of people think the same way.
>
> The point is that this should not be about a moral stance regarding Open
> Source software - there are end users who are using this product and simply
> don't care if it's Open Source or not, and they're the ones who are putting
> the money into it, if not by donating to the project, by buying RedHat or
> Solaris or some other software which in turn feeds money into XFree86
> development.

And there are users like me that place great value in the availability
of the source code.

Binary drivers are very inflexible pieces of software. There is no
guarantee that a new version will be available that support new extension
or a new compiler. So it is quite possible to find oneself tied to a
particular software set just because this is what is required for that
binary only driver.

And there are other reasons, of course.

>
> > So, if we trully had the sources for this, fine, we would write the
> > drivers, but that is not the case.
>
> Is that _really_ the case, though? I've been waiting for the 7500 driver to be
> fixed for sooo long now. The problem's fixed in the DRI trunk, apparantly,
> but not in the main trunk, and hasn't been for the 8 months since I had the
> card. (I tried, and failed, to get DRI-trunk working once before, and I don't
> have time to try it again).

What is the problem ? I've been using AIW 7500 for a while now and have
not noticed any DRI-related problems.

>
> Wasn't one of the main complaints about XFree86 the fact that it was so hard
> to become a core developer, and the fact that it took so long for things to
> be added to the tree?
>

Code does propagate slowly into XFree86 tree.

                         best

                            Vladimir Dergachev