Leaving?

[Erwin Rol]

On Fri, 2006-07-28 at 11:34 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Friday 28 July 2006 11:31, n0dalus wrote:
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't most of this discussion about
> > something which currently uses X breaking? Just because it uses the
> > internal ABI doesn't really mean anything.
> 
> Yes, the thread is about binary 3rd party modules which are outside the X 
> tree.  Which frankly, I could give a give a rip about.  We break the ABI all 
> the time with kernel updates.  Users have to get the new module.  This is 
> only slightly different in that there isn't a new module yet for them.  Too 
> bad, that's an Nvidia problem, not our problem.

I wonder why ppl are making such a big deal out of this driver thing.
Dave Airlie wrote a working ATI driver for their newest cards
http://airlied.livejournal.com/31180.html?view=56012#t56012 
the only tiny problem is that the register names and bit positions are
so super secret that ATI will not even talk to Dave about allowing him
to release his driver. So instead of wasting our energy here fighting
each other maybe we should put the same amount of effort in pointing out
to the world that not only does ATI refuse to write a working Linux
driver, they even go as far as actively prevent others from writing
drivers for them (how stupid can you be to refuse someone to work for
you for free!). BTW we are not talking here about open sourcing the
driver ATI wrote, we are talking about a list of register names! 

So binary drivers are not a Fedora problem, this is plain and simple a
problem of a company that does not want you (a Linux user) to be their
customer. I may hope that AMD does want us as a customer, I already had
to buy a Intel based laptop so that I at least have a open source Xorg
driver for that.

- Erwin

PS: This also is valid for nVidea, but the open source driver for nVideo
cards is even worse than the ATI ones. And also for Matrox, they ones
were the love of every Linux user, until they decided that Open Source
was bad, and now they are gone.