effenberg0x0 wrote: > The idea of a petition came out from that thread. I have started this > petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/vialinux/ . > > If you plan on using your VIA based hardware on Linux, with a decent > performance, stability and security and if you think Linux users should have > the same support as Windows users receive from the company, I ask you to sign > this petition as well as help me spread this URL to your friends, family and > coworkers.
Interesting. While I agree with the essence of what you're trying to accomplish, I'll have to admit to you that I think the tone of the petition makes it likely to fail. Being antagonistic is usually ineffective in trying to get anything from a company. Instead, I suggest you look at the underlying issues. The basic fact is that they do publish source for their drivers at viaarena.com and the X server part of that source is licensed under the original MIT license. Hence, there's nothing precluding you from taking that code, vetting it and pushing it up to the xorg folks. The problem of course is that nobody should be doing this other than VIA. Maybe I'm biased, but my experience is that asian manufacturers have a hard time to deal with the open source model. That is at least what I witnessed when I was invited to become a special supporting member to the CE Linux Forum and the same thing when I was the maintainer of the Linux Trace Toolkit. You've got plenty of raw talent, but there's a disconnect between those manufacturers and the open source world. Here's an example. They ship their latest Linux sources in a .rar. When unrar'ed, you get a .tar.tgz ... whatever that is. And then, when you tar xvzf' it, you get a directory with all files, including .c .h, with the execute bit on. Plus, the source tarballs aren't signed by anybody. Of course if you've ever maintained OSS packages, these would be basic things. Clearly, though, VIA doesn't get this despite their willingness to provide Linux drivers; if nothing else, they are pouring man-hours into this -- IOW there's money going in that direction and *that* is commitment. So this might just be a case where they need some help. And offering them such help (i.e. being a bridge between their work and the open source community) might just be a path worthy to investigate. One thing is for sure though: beating them on the head won't accomplish anything. Disclaimer: There might be a historical context here which I'm aware of re VIA. Even if that were the case, though, there are plenty of manufacturers that for years had the wrong approach towards OSS and eventually "got it", ATI being a good example. HTH, Karim _______________________________________________ openchrome-users mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.openchrome.org/mailman/listinfo/openchrome-users Main page: http://www.openchrome.org Wiki: http://wiki.openchrome.org User Forum: http://wiki.openchrome.org/tikiwiki/tiki-view_forum.php?forumId=1
