On 10/12/06, Terry Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Lance Hanlen wrote:
> This proposal is about personality. It should not surprise anyone
> that Theo wants us to stand up and be counted by taking a strong
> stand, and being vocally critical of what is wrong in our world. He
> is as loud and uncompromising an activist as they come and he
> encourages everyone else to be one also.
Yes, and (I gather, I don't know him myself) that's Theo's personality.
Unless Timothy has a side about him I haven't yet seen, he seems a lot
more level-headed and pragmatic. You know, as one expects "hardware
guys" to be. "Personality" needs to be genuine. You can't fake it.
If Timothy were an iconoclastic loudmouth, I would say, "go for it". But
I think he's not, so he should just be fair and honest: 'We saw a
problem. We had the skills. We decided to fix it by doing some hard work
with those skills.'
What you see talking when I talk that way is many years of discipline
beaten into me. About 12 years ago, I developed some health problems
that seriously got in my way. I pretty much have that dealt with, but
I still often have problems with excessive fatigue. I beat it by
doing the only thing I can do: Focus.
I wouldn't say so much that I'm pragmatic as that I am willing to be
pragmatic when it's the thing I need to be in order to get something
done that's very important to me. When I want to achieve something, I
go for it, and I do what I gotta do. I have learned to calculate the
risks and engineer situations, but that's only after having gotten my
butt kicked from jumping head-first into so many other things.
Traversal isn't my first business. Look for my name here:
http://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/06/07/0022.php
(This lasted one whole issue.)
Traversal, I believe, is going to do well, because we will measure
what we do carefully. But that's not because I am so prone to measure
carefully. It's because I hooked up with Howard and Andy who measure
carefully, and I listen to what they say. The OGP has a solid
grounding and is poised for success not because I'm all that special,
but because when I started the project, many knowlegable people from
the FOSS community stepped up and told me what I needed to know. And
I listened. I've pulled an Andrew Carnegie and surrounded myself with
people smarter than myself.
Left to my own devices, left to do what it is that comes naturally, I
would flit from one interesting idea to the next, without ever
completing any one thing. I've started many projects that I've never
finished. It's also hard to stay focused in school... too many
interesting projects that I could get into, all of them unrelated to
my core research. Keeping myself on track is an active process.
Umm.... where was I going with all of this?
Oh yeah... I act pragmatically because that achieves my goals, which
are to produce open hardware and to have a good reason to spend more
time designing chips. I can act in other ways if they achieve my
goals.
One thing that you're surely right about is that it's not in me to
behave just as they do. I want to say just as much as they do, but I
do it in a style that is much more passive and indirect. When I was
younger, I was arrogant and didn't consider other people's feelings
and points of view. I would bowl people over with my opinions, doing
nothing more than piss them off and alienate them. Now, I've gone the
other way and feel that (nearly) every point of view is deserving of
some respect, even if I don't agree with it. As Lorne once said on
Angel, "How are you supposed to joust someone when you partially agree
with their point of view?" So far, I've gone about this project by
saying to myself that it's nVidia's right to keep their IP closed...
and it's my right to work to make an alternative. I've also worked on
the principle that not everyone involved in the project is going to
have the same goals as me, but that needn't stop us from working
together and helping each other with our differing goals.
However, I'm saying that, within ethical boundaries, if I have to
ruffle some feathers to make the alternative, then so be it. Just by
doing this project, some people are going to get upset. You can't
please everyone. I will not say that the individual people at nVidia
are evil. I'm certain they're not. But their IP policy is totally
self-serving, done in large part out of fear of ATI, and they are
really more concerned about their profit margin than they are about
meeting the needs of consumers. There is no "customer is always
right" at nVidia. I can't prove it, but nVidia strikes me as the sort
of company that innovates ONLY because of the competition; just like
losing marketshare to AMD is the only thing that drives Intel to truly
innovate, nVidia is pushed to advance mostly out of fear of losing
marketshare to ATI (and ATI is no better!).
This is why working with the community is so much fun. Intel and
nVidia minimize development costs by avoiding development. We can
minimize development costs by sharing with the community and letting
them share with us the innovations that we come up with together.
But I'm getting side-tracked from the main discussion, which is
whether or not I have the kind of personality necessary to stand up
and speak loudly for a cause. I believe the personality I already
have is sufficient for that. I can say what needs to be said. I just
have a tendency to file off a few more pointy corners than the other
guys do. When I speak euphamistically or indirectly about someone...
you still know whom I'm talking about.
However... and this is a big however ... what will you do if they
listen? What if ATI and nVidia call your bluff and release a card with
open specifications? The open/free-licensed design is (to me anyway) an
important core concern of this project. Even if ATI releases another
open-spec card that X.org can support, I'll still prefer the open design
one.
The fact is, any card that they might release full specs for would be
just as old-tech as OGA, if not worse. They're not going to give up
their money-makers at the high end, so they'll start selling $24
Radeon 7000 cards again. Big whoop. We'll beat Radeon 7000
performance hands-down, and we'll be infinitely more cooperative with
the developers who write drivers, thereby ensuring a less buggy, more
stable system.
But for most users, most of the value is the open spec, not the open
design. And ATI or nVidia can beat you on that. Intel already has --
they've recently released open specs on their graphics system, which is
built into a number of popular Intel motherboards. The buzz is that
this is an attempt to gain an advantage against ATI (especially in light
of other events, such as AMD recently buying ATI -- thus putting them in
a position to compete directly with Intel on motherboards with built-in
graphics).
I think Theo's argument was made that this is all appearances and
little substance. IIUC, they haven't released full specs. They've
released partial specs to a handful of Linux driver coders. They're
playing like they're supporting FOSS, but really they're not.
IMHO, the better strategy is to promote the values of openness without
actually mentioning the competition. However, I think you will have
more success attracting attention if the focus is on the benefits and
social value of fully open / free-licensed design of the hardware, and
not merely the open specification advantages. From a logical
perspective, the latter may be more important, but from the point of
view of trying to inspire people to help you, the former is more likely
to get the job done.
I think the very least of what Theo and Lance are suggesting is to
make a comparison. Coke and Pepsi compare against each other all the
time.
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