[forum] Re: "Drivers? We don't need no stinking..."

[James Arthur]

On Wednesday 26 March 2003 21:01, Sven Luther wrote:
> What did they get in return ? I bought a Radeon 9000 for my spare box,
> which i would _not_ have bought if there was no open source drivers. And
> the fact that most DRI developpment is done on ATI hardware, is a big
> plus for them, i guess most people buying video hardware for a linux box
> (and thinking about 3D) will know this and buy their card.

No offence, but one Radeon 9000 isn't going to make much difference to ATI.

Having said that, I bought a Radeon 7500 for precisely the same reason, and 
regretted it ever since. In future I'll be buying a graphics card where the 
drivers are fully supported and sure to work, which probably means the 
drivers will be closed source and supported by the vendor; but so long as it 
works, I don't really care. I'm a great believer in "it should just work" and 
I think a lot of people think the same way.

The point is that this should not be about a moral stance regarding Open 
Source software - there are end users who are using this product and simply 
don't care if it's Open Source or not, and they're the ones who are putting 
the money into it, if not by donating to the project, by buying RedHat or 
Solaris or some other software which in turn feeds money into XFree86 
development.

> So, if we trully had the sources for this, fine, we would write the
> drivers, but that is not the case.

Is that _really_ the case, though? I've been waiting for the 7500 driver to be 
fixed for sooo long now. The problem's fixed in the DRI trunk, apparantly, 
but not in the main trunk, and hasn't been for the 8 months since I had the 
card. (I tried, and failed, to get DRI-trunk working once before, and I don't 
have time to try it again).

Wasn't one of the main complaints about XFree86 the fact that it was so hard 
to become a core developer, and the fact that it took so long for things to 
be added to the tree?

This isn't a flame, by the way. I do appreciate the XFree86 project. Honest :)

--jaa