[Openchrome-users] VIA Announces Open Source Driver Initiative

[pcpa@mandriva.com.br]

Quoting Xavier Bachelot <xavier at bachelot.org>:

> Felipe Reyes wrote:
>> hi,
>>
>> El mar, 08-04-2008 a las 22:49 +0000, Mart?n Carr escribi?:
>>> I am sure you have read this:
>>> http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/04/08/202227.shtml
>> [snip]
>>
>> yeah!, I'm almost happy, because k8m800 chipset will have no support (i
>> hope that will be added in the near future), i think that the openchrome
>> dev team have done an amazing job, so if via will work _with_ the
>> community this driver will grow up faster, especially if the
>> mesa/dri/drm stack gets a unichrome mantainer.
>>
>> Xavier, what do you think about this announcement?, because you said in
>> some mail the incapacity of work with the community (like release .rar
>> files)
>>
> Making an announcement is one thing, working with the community and by the
> community rules, especially given their past history, is another. 
> It's not the
> first time VIA make such an announcement. Afaik, they did not contact anyone
> from the X community before making it. That said, I'll give them the 
> benefit of
> the doubt, but I'll trust them when I see some facts, not some marketing hot
> air. I certainly want to believe this time will be the good one, but talk is
> cheap...

  Hopefully this time they will get it right. At least due to the fact
that now intel and amd are releasing specs, they should not fear so
much people "robbing" their IP... But they need to have more integration
with Xorg and/or openchrome people.

  I worked recently with a OEM for a "olpc like" computer that has VX800
chipset, and only after almost 2 month telling that it was not working,
we managed to have someone from VIA in the "mail loop".
  Then more one month with their binary only driver, trying all options
from the the latest sources available at www.viaarena.com with
no success. I even did some experiments dumping and hacking the vga
video bios...
  The final solution was an xorg.conf option added to their latest binary
only driver, and they telling us to not look at the sources from viaarena
because it is outdated :-)

> Regards,
> Xavier

Paulo