Rant about ATI

[Marek Wawrzyczny]

On Tuesday 08 August 2006 22:42, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 12:11:37PM +0200, Andreas Hauser wrote:
> > Why would it not be appropriate? It was choosen to allow a binary ABI,
> > explicitly so that closed drivers can exist. So i don't understand,
> > all the crying about the vendors now, when obviously this was wanted.
>
> No-one _wants_ binary-only drivers per se.  Some people are more willing
> than others to accept their existence.

I cannot agree with this point. There is little chance that a commercial 
company is going to release details necessary for drivers of upcoming 
hardware. At least with closed-source drivers the development can start more 
or less ahead of the release date.

I also think that hardware companies deem the drivers to contain material that 
reveals some of their IP and current/future strategies. I won't argue if this 
is likely to be true or not, I'm not a driver developer but you can't force a 
company to do otherwise. 
You could of course block a particular piece of hardware from working in X (or 
the kernel) but that would lead to frustration for us, users.
The situation is that not everyone that uses X is a programmer, not everyone 
is able to write a driver... :)

From the users perspective I just want things to work. I would love to be able 
to show Linux at its best when showing it to Windows/Apple desktop users. I 
could not care less where the driver comes from. To me, the driver is just a 
little (albeit an important) part of the big X picture.

Marek Wawrzyczny