Rant about ATI

[Marek Wawrzyczny]

On Friday 11 August 2006 07:55, Daniil V. Kolpakov wrote:
> В сообщении от 9 августа 2006 16:51 Marek Wawrzyczny написал(a):
> > Also, I was under the impression that the X.Org group needs more
> > developers. If closed source drivers dissapeared overnight, would the
> > sudden influx of requests for hardware support slow down the development
> > of other strategic parts of X like the modular development, Xgl, etc? Or
> > maybe it would result in reduced hardware support instead?
>
> Can't you see, absence of open-source drivers slows down or even can make
> impossible development/research of "The New Stuff" like Xgl? I doubt we'd
> ever seen things like Render and Composite extensions if there were no open
> Radeon driver, for example (I might be wrong, but I'm under impression,
> after some months of reading the list, that the Radeon driver is the main
> testbed for the new technologies and nearly every Xorg developer owns a
> Radeon 9200 :)).

Which is why I am NOT advocating that they should be dropped :) They form an 
important part of X. I was simply saying that closed source driver support 
should not be dropped since we also depend on it.

Apart from that, how do you force an interested an engineer NOT to write their 
own driver :) Maybe promise him an unlimited supply of beer...

Anyway... isn't there a chance that all this discussion is mute? I've read 
(totally unconfirmed) rumours that since the AMD takeover of Ati, AMD might 
be considering open sourcing the Ati drivers anyway. 
Regardless of that, their drivers have improved lately as I have managed to 
get XGL to work on my Mobility X600 just last week. Last time I tried (~2 
months ago) I failed abysmaly. So maybe things are improving.


Marek Wawrzyczny