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

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:08:23PM +0100, 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.

Where would be the threshold ? How many users would make a difference ?
Notice that this represent 100% of the cards i bought, and that this is
not only what i would do, but what i would recomend on diverse mailing
lists where people ask such questions. And i think i am not the only one
in this case. Notice also that i could have bought a 9500 or something
such if it was supported, but did not.

> Having said that, I bought a Radeon 7500 for precisely the same reason, and 

You see, already two boards.

> 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.

You are aware that using proprietary drivers is not a guarantee of "it
just works", at least not from the feedback i see on the debian-x
mailing list, most problems come from mixed up mga_hal things but many
also have problems with the nvidia drivers.

> 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.

Well, it is not a moral stance, open source drivers often work better,
sure you may have to use somewhat older versions, but you don't get to
use the proprietary in developpment versions also, so this may be moot.
Also, you have better feedback and user support from your distribution
vendor.

> > 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).

You are aware that DRI release (weekly or so) trunk snapshots ? And that
Michel even has dri trunk debian packages ?

> 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?

This is not true, the DRI drivers are developped as part of the DRI
sourceforge project, where all these things don't apply.

Really what you are raising are more problems related to the longer
release schedule for 4.3.0 and the difficulties of getting the DRI
driver working than anything having to do with the open-sourceness of
the drivers and the availability of the specs.

Friendly,

Sven Luther