> Case in point: Who's paying Timothy's bills, and why has he been so > motivated to keep pushing OpenShader along? > > I was motivated to start the OGP in 2004 because at the time, there wasn't any off-the-shelf graphics card that had FOSS driver support. ATI, for instance, had just decided to stop publishing docs for the Radeon 9200 (or some similar model at the time, I forget exactly which). I thought it would be productive and fun to use my skills as a graphics chip designer to solve this problem.
I decided to change the direction of the project (the earlier approach had only very limited success anyhow) in early 2012 because I discovered that there were no particularly good GPU simulators and there was no open-architecture GPU at all. It's completely different for CPUs, with plenty of open-architecture designs and really good cycle-accurage and energy-accurate simulators. To get tenure, I'm going to have do something that makes a substantive impact on my field. Why not do it an area I'm really passionate about? Why not leverage something already going on? Why not have a positive impact on both the FOSS community and the academic community at the same time, with the same project? Also, I think it would be a lot of fun and a really compelling challenge solve this gaping problem. Also, I go to work every day to pay my bills. And I certainly don't think OpenShader is going to change that (at least not for the better). Now, I need to stop wasting time on this discussion and write some code. Seriously. I know it's important to get the copyright stuff worked out, but it pains me to think of all the code I could have written instead in the same amount of time. -- Timothy Normand Miller, PhD Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Binghamton University http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~millerti/<http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti> Open Graphics Project
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