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

["Kendall Bennett" <KendallB@scitechsoft.com>]

Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> 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.

IMHO the Open Source community *had* a big chance to change the way that 
hardware companies support the Open Source community in the graphics area 
a year or so ago, but they blew it big time. When it counted, all the 
Open Source people simple sat on their arses and complained, rather than 
putting up and getting their feet wet doing real work (it also probably 
didn't help that it took forever for ATI's patches to make it into the 
XFree86 CVS tree either). You can bet your bottom dollar that Intel, 
Matrox, NVIDIA and other companies were watching these events very 
closely, and I don't believe there is anything you will ever do to change 
their minds again now. NVIDIA was also completely closed from the start, 
and now with both Matrox and ATI going closed source and closed specs 
with their latest generation of hardware, I am sure they feel completely 
justified in the approach that they took (I just wish they would see the 
value in working with third parties under NDA like the other companies do 
however).

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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