On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Fred Heitkamp wrote: >I appreciate all the work various folks have done to move Linux >along. I have used Linux since about kernel 0.99. Now for me >at least Linux has become my daily OS. (I used to use OS/2 >daily and Linux as my secondary OS.) Many Thanks to All! > >I also understand the capitalist elements you detail. I am not >a hard core (meaning religious or fanatical) open source advocate. >Open source just makes good sense. I could go into the various >reasons why, but I won't and it's probably obvious to anyone >on this list anyway.
I am a quite hardcore open source advocate, although I do not classify myself as "religious" or "fanatical" though. One of the differences that separate me from some other advocates however, is that I understand some of the "capitalistic elements" very well that arise such as this one we've been discussing, and I am able to put myself into a neutral mind state, and look at the open source angle, and express my desires to have all hardware specifications available and as much open source code as possible, as well as understanding the corporate angle of the vendor, and why their decisions are chosen for what is best or "perceived to be the best" for their own likelyhood. Even if I very strongly desire to see something open sourced, I realize if the other party can not legally do something, or does not see the benefit of doing so, to *THEM* in their *OWN* eyes for reasons they *CARE* about for their financial success, and other factors important to *THEM*, then it stands to reason they wont do it. Would you? In fact, doing something like that might even get them in trouble with the SEC, and they'd most surely have to inform stockholders via SEC reports of the risks they'd be taking by open sourcing their stuff (assuming they legally could, which is almost certainly not true). More likely than not, a day later their stock would plummet and their competitor's stock would raise. >I wish some sort of compromise could be reached where the >proprietary never-to-be-open-sourced bits could be made to >coexist with the open bits in a timely manner. Matrox does this for some of their stuff via hallib. It does not however do everything that the other full proprietary drivers from other vendors do though, and the Matrox hallib does not make the mga driver comparable to their Windows driver offerings. It just improves the support of mode setup, adds dualhead on G400, and makes TVout work among a few other things. One thing that *could* be done which would be beneficial to OSS users, would be to have the large GPU engine removed from the kernel and done in userland, with a fast method of communicating to the hardware. That is completely possible in theory, and it would be great to see happen sometime. Not likely to happen until it is considered something financially worthy of spending the resources on though. >What I mean is that I don't like waiting for months and months >for various hardware and features to be supported by Linux. I >don't mean just with Xfree, but with other parts of Linux as >well, like media players and so forth. (My goal is never to >have to boot Windows for anything.) I don't know what a >workable solution from a technology aspect would be. Perhaps >some consistent pluggable module API or library scheme? Who likes waiting for anything? Everyone would like hardware to be supported with equal or better attention spent developing Linux/OSS support as is paid to Windows. I just isn't realistic however to expect a corporation to spend 50% of their development time supporting an OS that generates 1% of their revenue (or 0.01% or whatever). If anything, I would guess that many hardware vendors _already_ spend more percentage of resources on Linux development than they see percentagewise return of revenue for doing so. Of course that is likely true for some types of hardware and probably totally false for other types of hardware. I also have no statistics to back up this opinion, and I very well could be very wrong. I'll also likely change my opinion in 12 months, and then again every 4 to 6 months after that, as Linux's mainstream desktop usage curve increases. BTW, XFree86 has a module API ;o) -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
