On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Fred Heitkamp wrote: >> > Why do these companies not open source their complete drivers? >> > Because they have intellectual property in their drivers that >> >> As if their concurent where not capable of reverse engineering the >> drivers. > >Because it takes money and manpower. They are not going to do pull >engineers off of more lucrative projects to get them little if any >more profit.
Not to mention that any resources they do throw at Linux development will likely result in massive numbers of users bitching "that is not good enough damnit!" no matter what they do, unless they totally drop all Windows support and become a Linux-only hardware company devoted to producing Linux drivers above all else, and spend as many resources as possible on fixing every reported end-user problem that comes up, and hand holding users for free on installing and using their software. ;o) Unlikely to say the least. >> No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke >> or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they >> would sell more boards. > >Probably not enough to make the effort worthwhile. Probably the >only reason they do the FireGL drivers at all is because they already >had UNIX drivers folks were willing to pay big bucks for. Precicely. And if I understand correctly, it was good will more or less that caused changes to be made to support Radeon hardware. I haven't personally seen much end user gratitude on mailing lists, IRC or the web for that either. Most of it has been very negative and what I would classify as "thankless bitching". It is of no surprise to me that there are no 4.3.0 compatible drivers on the website (last I checked anyway), although there are on a German website. -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
