The ati petition

[Vladimir Dergachev]

Hmm.. IMO, it is rather ill-conceived. One could achieve more by asking 
less.

For example:

       "The signers of this petition will no longer purchase ATI products 
until ATI make a workable 3D accelerated 64-bit driver for Linux and a 
32-bit that utilizes the full potential of the Raedon chips."

        Linux (and BSD) is not just about ia32/ia64. We should be asking
for a way to utilize full graphics and video capabilities on any platform.

       "In the event that ATI cannot handle the programming of these 
drivers, we require all modern ATI chips to be open sourced to the Linux 
community so that drivers can be made. "

        It is not necessary to have full source code to the chips 
themselves to write a driver, rather just a good description on how to 
*access* the chip. (In case you don't know chips are designed using VHDL 
or Verilog - programming languages, so designing a chip is somewhat 
similar to writing a paper in TeX).

        More importantly, the petition tone is antagonistic, as it 
implicitly asks for ATI to surrender to its demands. This is pointless
as even if this goal were achieved it would have no bearing on a technical 
issue - getting ATI graphics cards well supported in Linux.

        I strongly suggest the writer of the petition to read through (if 
he or she has not done so already) the following link:

http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/vendor_relationships_paper.html

        Also, it is important to note that Precision Insight (and, in 
particular, Frank La Monica) had big problems persuading ATI to release 
specs to allow 3d support for Rage128 and Radeons and undoing the history 
of angry e-mails demanding documentation and flat refusals to provide it.

       It would be much better to petition ATI for something to cooperate 
with - for example a standardized way to encapsulate driver in 
architecture-indepedent code so they can keep their proprietary stuff, but 
let open source handle the rest.

                           best

                             Vladimir Dergachev


On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Gene Heskett wrote:

> Greetings;
>
> Has anyone heard of any fallout from this "open the src" petition to
> ati?   There is a link to it on LWN.
>
> I see there were over 13k signatures when I was there a day back,
> seems that should be a bit of a wakeup call, if only they'd fire all
> the attorneys first.
>
> -- 
> Cheers, Gene
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> 99.24% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
> Yahoo.com attorneys please note, additions to this message
> by Gene Heskett are:
> Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
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