Vendor support (was Re: The ati petition)

[Lee Revell]

On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 07:40, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Sul, 2004-09-05 at 01:41, Lee Revell wrote:
> > The drivers are open source.  Are you saying we should make a
> > distinction between open source drivers written under NDA and open
> > source drivers written from freely available docs?
> 
> Yes

OK.  Something like (in declining order of desirability)

full source with free (speech) docs
full source with NDA docs
full source, no docs
obfuscated source
reverse engineered
binary only
nothing

seems reasonable.  Did I miss anything?

> 
> > Seems to me the meaningful distinction here is between open source and
> > binary only.
> 
> You've never tried fixing a bug have you ?
> 

I certainly have, most recently in the emu10k1 ALSA driver.  Having the
docs would not have helped.  I just meant that as far as the ATI issue
is concerned, that open source drivers written from NDA docs would
address many people's complaints.

Lee