[cairo] glitz and shader programs

[Andrew Johnson]

On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 04:38, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> Going forward, I don't really see any of the major players (read: nvidia 
> and ATI) becoming any more "open source" friendly, as far as hardware 
> documentation goes -- we'll probably be stuck with proprietary drivers 
> for some time now, fairly good ones in nvidia's case, and horrid ones in 
> ATI's case.

I know its a side track to the general conversation, but, to try and
stop this myth again... ATI is VERY open  source friendly. In fact a
good majority of the X ati driver was written by someone at ATI(who
presumably has full documentation), and they have given full
documentation to the gatos people for new cards as recent as the 9700.
The proprietary drivers were only released for the general consumer
cards at the communities request, they have never intended to fully
support it, and cannot open source it because of third party components
internally. 

With the gatos drivers the ATI cards are already fairly well supported.
If you want better acceleration for something, consider talking to those
who have a good understanding of the cards and have a fair bit of the
documentation, the gatos people. If something such as the shader
implementations are not open source and none exist, it probably means
ATI and gatos don't consider it a priority, or perhaps the source in the
proprietary drivers depends on 3rd party extensions and would require
too much effort to try and port.

Andrew