On Sun, 2 Mar 2003, Smitty wrote: >OK but here is my take on it, people will work on what they are >interested in, so if someone wants to work on R128 and ATI does >give out docs for that chip then they should give it to him. > >Whats the chance of ATI delegating some of this function to TG, ie just >give all their hardware programmers guides etc that they are willing to >let people see to TG with the understanding that TG only allow people who >should see them to get hold of them.
I think ATI is more than capable of determining who the are and are not willing to provide their hardware specifications to. I of course am not an ATI employee, and I do not know what their detailed reasoning is for access to their hardware specifications, nor do I care really, it's their documentation and they've got their own right to decide who gets what, and under what circumstances. >Surely TG can respond quicker than a juggernaut like ATI, and >then Jon Smirl would have got his docs already and made some >progress. I don't think response time is an issue at all. >This also makes sense in terms of concentrating development of >OSS 3D drivers, allowing for higher productivity through >division of labour, knowledge concentration, etc, rather than >scattering the docs thinly accross the world to individuals. > >It doesn't compel those who have no interest in DRI but it sure >helps those who do. It's a no brainer that the more widely available hardware docs are for any hardware, the more likelyhood of them being put to use by one or more people in the OSS community. That isn't a debateable topic I don't think. This whole issue however has nothing to do with "who is the arbiter of access to vendor foo's documentation". Any particular vendor may or may not permit access to some/all/none of their documentation either freely and publically, or via NDA to specific individuals under whatever criterion they wish to decide upon. A bunch of people whining on a mailing list is not going to change that at all. In general, someone who goes ahead and works on the code and makes improvements WITHOUT a vendor's documentation generally has a better chance at actually getting it. Those who do nothing but whine on mailing lists that they can't do work on the code because they don't have the docs, are more likely to never see them. I don't think that any vendor is planning on providing hardware documentation widespread or to specific individuals based on a popular vote of some mailing list. There are certain realities that people must learn to accept and to deal with, and one of them is that some video hardware vendors do not want to provide any access to their hardware specifications at all. Others don't want their documentation widespread and public for whatever reasons they may have (none of our business really IMHO), but they may want to support the open source community nonetheless, and so they provide access to their documentation under an NDA agreement that they are comfortable with. It allows them to protect whatever it is they're wanting to protect, and it allows open source progress to be made as well. We're lucky to get specifications from any vendor who is willing to provide them to us under _ANY_ terms. I'd love to see more vendors providing specs, and doing so more openly, and preferably without NDAs. Ragging on vendors who do permit access to docs under NDA to people of their choosing, for not providing them to the world, is more likely to dry up access to specs for _EVERYONE_, and make binary only drivers the only way of getting modern hardware to work. In other words, I believe that whining about these certain realities, is equivalent to shooting one's self in the foot. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
