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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Inhibit May 09, 2006 9:53 AM EDT |
Quote FTA: "in ten years of holding out, the FOSS community has made relatively few gains" I, ah, I honestly don't know how to respond to that one. After having just read the BSD maintainer Theo's take on the driver issue (totally unrelated to Freespire) and reading him say that most vendors like the proposition of having someone else maintain their drivers (with the exception of video card vendors, due to some rather finicky reasoning on their part) I'm kinda shocked at this statement. I don't know weather it's biased or just deceptive. Check out Theo's interview for a nice conversation on the driver situation over at Kerneltrap. http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550 Am I drawing the wrong conclusions here? |
| dcparris May 09, 2006 10:01 AM EDT |
Well, ask yourself if ATI or NVidia (a.k.a., Nvidious) or a number of other major vendors support, let alone supply, FOSS drivers and codecs. We have made gains, but we seem to be waiting on ATI or NVidia to deliver the golden desktop era to us on a silver platter. A large number of other vendors supply only binary drivers, if any at all. We have much to accomplish as a community. HTH. |
| dinotrac May 09, 2006 10:12 AM EDT |
I suspect that only one thing will change the situation: A company coming up with fully competitive hardware that opens up its specs so that driver development is effectively outsourced. At that point, market economics will do their work. |
| tuxchick2 May 09, 2006 10:15 AM EDT |
Baloney FOSS has not made gains. Compare what you can do today with Linux with what you could do five years ago. I'm getting tired of Linspire's misinformation. ATI and nVidia are perfect examples of what happens when users embrace closed platforms- the others die and we're stuck with no choices. |
| number6x May 09, 2006 10:25 AM EDT |
try kororaa xgl live cd:
http://kororaa.org/static.php?page=static060318-181203 Although it is only beta at version 0.2 it is amazing. Some screen resolutions are not supported too wel yet. try dropping to a terminal ( ctrl + alt + F1 ) and entering 'fixme' at the command line if you have problems. Its only at v 0.2, but looks to be very nice and stable already. You can show your windows using friends some of the 3-d features that Vista will give them in 2007 on high end systems with this live cd right now on their older computers! |
| Inhibit May 09, 2006 10:52 AM EDT |
nVidia and ATI are good examples of holdouts in releasing GPL drivers or solid specs on their products to work (but only in 3D) in Xorg. I see them as being a bit of an exception though. Personally, except for some dated multiport serial card adaptors and one of the bleeding edge wifi cards I haven't had to use any out-of-kernel drivers in the past few years. That means I'm supporting roughly 30 devices with Open Source drivers on my two testing desktops alone. The availability of those two proprietary 3D video drivers is pretty important, and I agree having them in the release is handy. However, I take exception to the statement that the number of devices that use binary drivers is large and GPL/BSD drivers haven't made headway. I've seen the same thing Theo de Raadt was talking about with the number of binary drivers that have opened or been worked around increasing. Especially with the Taiwanese vendors (such as RealTek) there's a tendency to supply whatever goods/information is necessary for the kernel maintainers to do their job. So without any detailed list to back it up, I've been under the impression that open source, particularly GPL, drivers have been making gains by leaps and bounds. Although with many vendors it does take a lot of convincing to get them to capitulate. I just see a lot of progress as being made in the last ten years from my vantage point, although pressure needs to be continuously applied, the situation seems to be improving. I've been wrong before though, I just hope I'm not now ;). |
| dcparris May 09, 2006 12:04 PM EDT |
> Baloney FOSS has not made gains. Compare what you can do today with Linux with what you could do five years ago. I'm getting tired of Linspire's misinformation. I did not say - nor did Carmony, for that matter - that FOSS has not made gains. Rather, both of us are saying that we are not realizing the gains we seek. We've obviously made _some_ gains, but not to the extent that all the major manufacturers are bending over backwards to give us their GPL'ed drivers. Why all the ballyhooing over ATI, NVidia and others, if we're making such tremendous strides? Tuxchick, I generally agree with you on most issues. I hope you understand that just because I agree with one aspect - that we have only gained so much - don't take that as me defending Carmony and Linspire in general. Perhaps where ATI, NVidia, et. al., are concerned, we could try a different approach. |
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