At Tue, 2 Sep 2003 12:31:21 +0200, Nicos Gollan wrote: > > On Tuesday 02 September 2003 06:00, csj wrote: > > Some ex-X coders have already forked XFree86. There's already an > > established dri project at sourceforge which is responsible for > > creating the more bleeding edge 3D support for X (note the use of the > > relative "more"). > > Judging from all the other attempts at establishing a new > graphic frontend, the only thing that will keep Xouvert from > just vanishing is - sadly - its X heritage. DRI is all nice but > it lacks vendor support (Radeon 9[5-9]00? no chance unless the > Weather Channel gets nice once more) and if a vendor is so nice > to publish drivers there's a guarantee somewhere in the GPL > (which doesn't even apply to Xfree) that some f***** zealots > will curse them to hell and back for not being open source.
I'd consider myself a near-zealot. However I don't mind using closed-source software from the very vendor of a product who has a monopoly anyway on the manufacture of the product. If the maker of VideoChip-X regularly provides free-beer binaries for GNU/Linux, and they're the only ones making it, then good. Such binaries are no different from firmware that's hardcoded or flashed into ROM. And we don't see that many people complaining about the closed source BIOS of their motherboard. > There's a problem of legacy (X itself) and mentality (hardcore > GNU dunces) which has been successfully keeping back *nix from > the masses since inception. It's middle management all over > again. I take it to mean that there are non-hardcore GNU dunces? But isn't GNU supposed to be not Unix? It's part of their master plan! They want the masses to convert to Hurd/GNU! Note that there's also the *BSDs. And I don't think their developers will confess to any substantial debt to the GNU project, except perhaps for the compiler. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]