On 10/11/06, Nick S-A <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Lance and Theo have been having some discussions, and one of the
> suggestions that has come out of it is that we might benefit from
> coming more vocal and activist about our beliefs.
>
> What do you think we should do? What can we do to get ourselves on
> the radar of more people on the FOSS community and in IT in general?
It is always a good idea to get more press and information around the
world, but we might not want to come across as TOO much of an embrace-
open-source sort of group. It might convince some corporations that
we are not as stable or secure as other AMD or Nvidia options.
This is where Traversal comes in. To the OGP, Traversal is just a
corporate front, there to serve the project where the project needs to
manage profit and major expendatures.
But to the rest of the world, Traversal is a serious company with
ambition and a strong desire to make lots of money and grow. From the
outsider's point of view, Traversal is LEVERAGING open source (by
being nice to some open source projects) as a means to drastically
reduce development costs. We could go so far as to say that Traversal
is EXPLOITING open source, using both the positive and negative
connotations of 'exploit'.
My opinion of this whole situation is that trying to get together a
critical mass of distributed organizations with money to fund open
source hardware would be too slow or impossible. As I see it, the
only way to speed things along is to form a company and work to earn
profit. We can then "reinvest" that profit into the community and
into building more hardware. But we need a centalized corporate
organization to manage it. Perhaps there are other ways of doing this
that don't require a corporation, but on the other hand, perhaps this
is just one of many valid approaches, and we've selected one. So
let's make it work.
I believe that it is possible to operate a corporation without
sacrificing your sense of ethics. At least, our full intent is to
remain ethical to the end, even if it costs us opportunities for
profit... which it will.
>
> One of Theo's suggestion is to use the "people are only interested in
> negative press" factor. We could submit trade articles that point out
> the flaws in another graphics vendor and how we're a suitable
> alternative. This would get us positive exposure (negative press for
> A is positive for ~A). It would be a way to call people to
> participate on the project. And it would draw attention to us in
> commercial circles, like embedded where we think we'll sell the most
> graphics chips and to people who want FPGA boards.
If we do decide to get vocal about this, we might have some other
consequences. For example, if we are lucky, AMD might release ATI
drivers open source (or have they already? I haven't been following
this too closely)
They have not, and they published a statement that they have no plans to change.
which could be good or bad. Good, because it means
that a lot of linux users are a lot happier with it, which means more
people, which means more OGP users for those who want to upgrade
their cards. Bad because it means that many people would prefer to
stay with a "name brand", e.g. ATI or Nvidia or other vendor, rather
than use OGP, and open sourcing the ATI drivers would mean they would
be a viable alternative (to OGP).
I agree that that is an issue. The money-greedy side of me wants them
to never release specs so that our financial position is secured. The
open source hardware side of me sees our secure position as a way to
fund further open source hardware development (not just graphics).
The open source software side of me just wants to be able to get any
old graphics card to work with open source drivers.
One of my greatest desires is to be able to scratch my itch as an
engineer, to design hardware and be able to actually implement it.
That is fun to me. And that fuels my desire to secure the financial
position where that work is funded.
Is the commercial version going to be an FPGA or ASIC, or has that
not been decided yet?
The commercial FPGA prototyping board is FPGA-based. The commercial
graphics card will use an ASIC.
I think that quite a few people (I for one)
would be interested in a cheap, effective FPGA devel platform with
PCI in the order of a couple hundred dollars.
Well, that's what OGD1 is!
Just a few ideas to throw out there!
Keep 'em coming.
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