GPL flag for x.org drivers

[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 15 May 2007, Hal V. Engel wrote:
>On Tuesday 15 May 2007 09:02, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>  From the perspective of the mostly-open-source OS vendor I work at, we'd
>> love to see ATI & nvidia follow Intel's lead and open their driver
>> sources,
>
>It appears that AMD/ATI might actually be following Intels lead and moving
>toward open sourcing their drivers.  See
>
>http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/13/1659245
>
>The anouncement is not as clear as I would have liked but AMD does have a
>history of supporting open source through their work on the Linux kernel and
>this is a good sign that at some point we might start seeing open source
>drivers for AMD/ATI hardware.

I beg to differ, there has never any visible support from ATI for any ATI card 
I ever made the mistake of buying.  Including several years ago waiting for 
linux support of a certain card I could afford, it showed up so I bought the 
card, at about $90 at the time.  Guess what, without changing a single dotted 
I on the boxes artwork, ATI had changed the chipset that card was built with!

So I thought (this was back in the days when XFree86 was king) I'd buy the 
driver from xorg or something named suspiciously like it, for a $20 bill and 
had my card duly charged since they claimed to support it right on their web 
page.  But when the deal was consummated, that driver didn't work either, 
didn't even acknowledge there was a card installed in the box.  xorg, or 
whomever it was, denied my request for a refund based on the fact that I did 
download the driver and had therefore executed it.

That did piss me off and the card went back to Staples & got traded in on an 
nvidia and the nv driver just worked.  Not speedily but usable.  But that 
card died a horrible death and took the motherboard with it a year later, so 
when I rebuilt I put another ATI 9200SE in based on the noise that ATI was 
going to support their products on linux.  But it had an R280 chipset and 
that never happened.

I'm sick up to here of ATI's empty promises and will not change my mind until 
there are working drivers even for the lowest of their generic cards for 
linux.  Until then they are just peeing into the wind.

>In addition this may put pressure on nvidia 
> to open up either their driver sources or their hardware specs.
>
>Hal
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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