On 12/15/05, Nicolas Capens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Timothy,
>
> It's been a while since I carefully read some of the mails on this list, but
> I have some comments on this piece of text...
>
> First you accurately explain why it is of great importance for, in
> particular NVIDIA and ATI, to keep their driver software closed. They you
> expect ("inevitable outcome") all hardware will get open specifications and
> we'll be free to write drivers for them. I can't find any reason why this
> would happen.
>
> I do have confidence that you'll open up a valuable niche market, but I
> doubt you'll have any significant influence on the big buys. This text
> certainly didn't convince me of that...Well, this point is this: As long as Linux people remain resolute, hardware companies are going to have to do something to be able to sell to Linux users. Linux is growing in popularity, and that growth rate doesn't appear to be shrinking. It may be that many hardware companies will keep locked up tight, but eventually, the pressure is going to be so great that at least some of them will do SOMETHING. For instance, ATI could continue to sell the R280. There are decent open source drivers for the Radeon 9250. Just don't EOL the product. That won't stop them from continuing independently with other stuff for Windows. The fact of the matter is that Linux people are more than willing to buy relatively old or low-end hardware just to have it work with open source drivers. If a company does it right, they'll be able to make good money selling to Linux users by just continuing to sell older stuff (whose development costs are paid for already). There's a big fight going on between the growth of free software and the resistance to openness of hardware vendors, and that fight is going on mostly inside the hardware vendors who don't know how to play both sides of the fence. Old-school management is not good at thinking outside of the box, and it's going to hurt them. They try to conform Linux to their expectations, but it's not going to work because Linux's success is due to it being different from that. Anyhow, to me, for the short term, it's neither here nor there. The longer other vendors take to get their heads straightened around, the greater our chances of being able to make OGP a success. But someone would have discovered the potential of making open hardware anyway. Had it not been me, it would have been someone else. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
