The ati petition

[Alan Cox]

On Gwe, 2004-09-03 at 10:03, Hamie wrote:
> Possibly the petition should also be circulated widely to the vendors 
> who build ATI chipsets into their hardware. Such as IBM... If you want 
> an IBM thinkpad, you don't (Currently) get a choice of graphics card... 
> Apart from which ATI chipset it's using... If there was another vendor 
> who did good keyboards & trackpoints on their thinkpads, I'd switch in a 
> flash...

So ask IBM to provide i915 based systems. Thats much less antagonistic
and has the right effect (or ask Dell to make decent keyboards or
whatever 8))

The big vendors do wield influence and in the right places. However
their influence is dictated by financial considerations and how much
concern vendors have about their 'secrets'. They can go to people and
say "Well we need 150,000 of these and Linux open source support is a
consideration" but at the same time if the vendors like ATI feel their
source is worth more than that then end of story.

I'm happy to still buy ATI stuff that is R2xx because the 3D is great
and the 2D driver support is really well maintained. I don't expect
either ATI or Nvidia to budge on their high end hardware although I'm
disappointed Nvidia haven't done so for the really old stuff they no
longer sell.

Alan