28 Nov
2004
28 Nov
'04
5:29 p.m.
On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 15:02:33 -0500
Lee Revell <rlrevell(a)joe-job.com> wrote:
On Sun, 2004-11-28 at 13:50 -0500, Chris Metzler wrote:
No doubt; and I hope my post didn't suggest otherwise. I was merely
trying to make the point that in some cases: 1) free software/open source
solutions have fallen short of meeting some people's needs (and that's
not a criticism of anyone, believe me; it's just a statement of reality);
2) for those people, it can come down to using proprietary software to
accomplish what they need to, or not accomplishing what they need to at
all.
Put another way, opting for closed source drivers does *not* mean that
one doesn't care at all about the importance of free (as in speech)
software. It doesn't even necessarily mean that one thinks closed source
drivers are OK. One can think that proprietary software is bad, but not
paying one's bills is worse.
-c
--
Chris Metzler cmetzler(a)speakeasy.snip-me.net
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
Passing the info on to the DRI project folks got
no
response at all; further queries revealed that the DRI project's
Matrox experts effectively aren't involved in the DRI project
anymore, so now no open source developers are working on the Matrox
drivers. A little bit of time spent in the XF86/X.org/DRI bug
tracking systems will show similar Matrox bugs that don't get any
responses from the developers.
According to the DRI folks, the issue here is that 3D drivers are
_hard_, and there are just not enough open source developers who have
the skills to fix these kinds of things. For example there are 3 or 4
3D chipsets for which we have docs but no driver.
So it's not quite as simple as "release some docs and the community will
write a driver".