some closure on the xorg updates issue

Toshio Kuratomi toshio at tiki-lounge.com
Fri Aug 11 16:09:19 UTC 2006


On Fri, 2006-08-11 at 20:33 +0530, Rahul wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 
> > Thank you for reframing the question in a light that many of the rest of
> > us are seeing as well!
> > 
> > Put yet another way, upgrading X.org isn't about punishing vendors of
> > proprietary drivers, it's about _rewarding_ vendors of open source
> > drivers.
> > 
> > If you were the owner of a company that had just announced plans to open
> > source your drivers, would you feel you had made the right decision if a
> > major linux distribution announced it was planning not to release the
> > software that enabled your driver to run because there were still
> > vendors who hadn't open sourced their drivers?  Where's the creme
> > filling?
> 
> Fortunately we arent announcing anything like that. We are just 
> announcing that we would wait for the next release before we provide 
> this major update.  

Thank you for letting me know my wording was ambiguous.

If you were the owner of a company that had just announced plans to open
source your drivers, would you feel you had made the right decision if a
major linux distribution announced it had changed its mind about
releasing the software that enabled your driver to run and delayed its
shipment for two months *because* there were still vendors whose
proprietary drivers were not updated?

> You can pain it as a idealogical battle if you want 
to but that's not what this is about at all.

But it is :-)  The decision can be made based on the non-ideological
points but the ramifications of that decision will be both technical and
political.

Additionally, Max's email unfortunately summarizes the battle as
ideology vs practicality: The reason to upgrade to Xorg-7.1 is to punish
the vendors; the reason to hold off is to protect the users which I
object to strenuously.  Instead of putting the user experience on one
side of the equation and ideology on the other phrase the whole thing as
ideology (which I did) or the whole thing on satisfying the users (as
Oisin Feeley addressed).

Even better, since Mike Harris made the original announcement that FC5
was going to have Xorg-7.1 [1]_, let him make the announcement that he
decided that 7.1 was going to be too problematic.  He's used to being
the bearer of bad news ;-)

[1]_
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2006-July/msg00676.html

-Toshio
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