Getting to a GL based X server

[Daniel Stone]

On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 07:54:09PM -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
> You aren't thinking like a proprietary chip vendor. Chip vendors have
> to do two drivers: Windows D3D and Windows OpenGL. Everything else is
> optional.
> 
> Nvidia already ignores DRI and simply ports their Windows OpenGL
> driver to Linux. I'm trying to formalize this process. The new model
> should result in us getting more support from these vendors. It will
> be closed source but at least we will have fully functional drivers.
> 
> Don't cry about it not being open source. They aren't giving us the
> chip specs to write an open source driver anyway.

There's an argument to be made that this is exactly the sort of
behaviour which should not be encouraged.  If we acquiesce to that, and
effectively say, 'please come and write proprietary drivers', years of
work spent gently encouraging vendors to write open-source drivers with
open specs.  No-one will be writing any new open-source drivers, and
we'll kick ourselves when these vendors start co-operating less and
less, and we realise the world we've created for ourselves is one where
we sort of stick our fingers in our ears, and say 'la la la la la la la!'
until the people trying to make our X server better go away.

I don't want huge binary blobs sitting below my X server.  I don't think
we should encourage people to be moving this way, especially when it's
already notoriously difficult to encourage them do things openly.
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