[Openchrome-users] VIA: Decent Drivers for Linux Petition (please help if you can)

[Karim Yaghmour]

effenberg0x0 wrote:
> The idea of a petition came out from that thread. I have started this petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/vialinux/ .
> 
> If you plan on using your VIA based hardware on Linux, with a decent performance, stability and security and if you think Linux users should have the same support as Windows users receive from the company, I ask you to sign this petition as well as help me spread this URL to your friends, family and coworkers.

Interesting.

While I agree with the essence of what you're trying to accomplish, I'll
have to admit to you that I think the tone of the petition makes it likely
to fail. Being antagonistic is usually ineffective in trying to get
anything from a company. Instead, I suggest you look at the underlying
issues.

The basic fact is that they do publish source for their drivers at
viaarena.com and the X server part of that source is licensed under the
original MIT license. Hence, there's nothing precluding you from taking
that code, vetting it and pushing it up to the xorg folks.

The problem of course is that nobody should be doing this other than
VIA. Maybe I'm biased, but my experience is that asian manufacturers
have a hard time to deal with the open source model. That is at least
what I witnessed when I was invited to become a special supporting
member to the CE Linux Forum and the same thing when I was the
maintainer of the Linux Trace Toolkit. You've got plenty of raw
talent, but there's a disconnect between those manufacturers and the
open source world.

Here's an example. They ship their latest Linux sources in a .rar.
When unrar'ed, you get a .tar.tgz ... whatever that is. And then, when
you tar xvzf' it, you get a directory with all files, including .c .h,
with the execute bit on. Plus, the source tarballs aren't signed by
anybody. Of course if you've ever maintained OSS packages, these
would be basic things. Clearly, though, VIA doesn't get this despite
their willingness to provide Linux drivers; if nothing else, they are
pouring man-hours into this -- IOW there's money going in that
direction and *that* is commitment.

So this might just be a case where they need some help. And offering
them such help (i.e. being a bridge between their work and the open
source community) might just be a path worthy to investigate.

One thing is for sure though: beating them on the head won't
accomplish anything.

Disclaimer: There might be a historical context here which I'm
aware of re VIA. Even if that were the case, though, there are plenty
of manufacturers that for years had the wrong approach towards OSS
and eventually "got it", ATI being a good example.

HTH,

Karim