Writing good and efficient drivers requires detailed knowledge of the inner workings of a semiconductor or subsystem. In an ideal world, that information would always be available, but in the real world it is not. Sometimes that detailed internal knowledge is considered proprietary and vendors will not be willing to share the information needed to create the drivers. Other times the vendor may just not have the necessary resources to document that information in such a way that outside resources can take advantage of this (I have worked for semiconductor companies where this was the case). Drivers are necessary so in some cases the vendor creates the drivers and for a variety of reasons, opt to keep them closed.
MeeGo is bigger than just Nokia and Intel, hopefully there will be many more companies developing hardware to run on MeeGo. It is also much bigger than cell phones, ARM, X86, etc. Reading through the many comments it seems a choice is needed. Either MeeGo can accept that hardware vendors will from time to time adopt hardware with closed drivers in order to achieve best in class performance, or they could dictate that only chips or subsystems with open source drivers be used and accept the compromises in features and performance that implies. Personally I would hope for the former. Gary H Tougas [email protected] On Mar 22, 2010, at 9:13 AM, Marius Vollmer wrote: > ext Thiago Macieira <[email protected]> writes: > >> Until someone develops *good* open-source drivers for it, we're stuck >> with the Imagination closed-source ones. > > What is missing to make this happen? Sufficient documentation, or > something else? I would think that sufficient talent is available. > _______________________________________________ > MeeGo-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
