> > I hadn't heard about Matrox having FLOSS drivers for their latest stuff.
> > IIUC, the Intel chips are only available on mainboards, not expansion cards.
> > Given their reputation for buggy chips and poor customer support I'll pass.
> > I have read about ATI/AMD's talking about better support for FLOSS,
> > but I haven't found actual quotes. I suspect what they mean is better
> > binary-only drivers. Probably only for Linux, and surely not for any
> > CPU other than x86/AMD64.
>
> Too many things we're not sure about. Better to not commit.
I wasn't suggesting that you use any of the above in your talk.
> > Maybe something like
> >
> > We couldn't find any chip newer than the Radeon 9200 with
> > sufficient documentation to write a fully functional
> > device driver.
>
> I'm very nervous about saying anything specifically negative about a
> specific vendor.
Does this say something negative about a specific vendor? IIUC the
Radeon 9200 *is* documented, so that is positive.
Going back your your original statement:
> > > Until recently, it's been hard to get graphics cards that work well
> > > with Free Software.
I may be wrong, but this doesn't sound accurate to me. It seems like
things are getting worse rather than better. For example the 9200 is
documented but newer chips are not.
If your statement *is* accurate, then why bother with OGP if we can
now get graphics cards that work well with Free Software?
Do we have info on which chips have sufficient documentation?
Did Nvidia ever document their graphics chips? Matrox? S3? ...
Maybe you could have a chart/graph/timeline showing when the
various companies stopped providing sufficient docs?
Brand A |--------------------
Brand B |-----------
Brand C |-----
Brand D |----------------
1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Maybe say "cards" rather than "chips" to avoid Intel.
Perhaps a graph is more detail than needed for this talk. Maybe
just something simple like
Recent graphics cards do not have enough documentation
available to write a fully functional device driver.
> I do like the IDEA you're trying to get across. I just don't want to
> be so specific. Feel free to argue otherwise.
I'm not going to argue for mudslinging. I might argue that a
simple statement of fact, with no pejoratives, isn't necessarily
mudslinging.
> To avoid feature creep, we've cherry-picked the most important
> features from the OpenGL specs from versions 1.3 up to 2.0. Our
> result is a fixed-function 3D rasterizer and fragment shader to which
> we've added some features, including some 2D features that weren't
> specified by the OpenGL requirements.
Better.
Maybe:
We've cherry-picked the most important features from the
OpenGL specs from versions 1.3 through 2.0. The result is
a fixed-function 3D rasterizer and fragment shader. And then
we included some additional features that weren't specified
by OpenGL.
I cherry-picked the most important parts of your paragraph. :-)
The downside to this is that someone might want/require a checkbox
for OpenGL 1.3 or 2.0 or whatever, and we're giving them a bit
of this a bit of that. It may well do the job they need, but
it is more work to determine if it will or not. I'm thinking that
a manager might ask their head engineer what to look for before
going to the talk. Engineer says "If it does OpenGL 2.0 it will
do what we need."
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