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



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