On Friday 14 Sep 2001 9:25 pm, you wrote:
> Is open source absolutely essential? Personally, I would rather have
> binary-only drivers written by the likes of Brian, Gareth, Keith, et.
> al. than binary-only drivers written by some faceless unknown.
Binary only drivers, ups and downs.
Ups:
The driver exists.
Downs:
It may not work on your architecture, with your kernel.
You can't debug it, or any other part of your kernel.
You can't audit it for security holes (i.e. don't put an nVidia card in a web
server)
It sets a precedent, and a bad one.
> Would an open/closed hybrid be feasible? A bare-bones, rasterization
> only base implementation could be completely open source, included in
> distributions, etc. A fully-featured driver w/ interesting extensions,
> T&L, etc. would be a binary-only, licensed product. Something similar to
> the way OSS works.
OSS works, but only just.
How many people do you know who bought OSS drivers?
How many people do you know who use ALSA instead?
> What other options are there? Is there a way to make this work? It's
> worth a bit of brainstorming and thought about whether some model can be
> put in place to support 3D driver development.
Step one: Get specs.
It's that simple. If you have enough people with ability and the specs, you
can get somewhere. No specs? Forget it.
> 3D is becoming increasingly important for general PC use. In the past,
> the domain of 3D has been primarily for DCC and games. In the future
> (and not that far in the future), 3D will be pervasive throughout the
> GUI. Without good 3D support, Linux is dead.
Never seen a 3D office suite/web server/ etc.
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