Several have suggested that some sort of donation driven effort
be made with which to sustain DRI development.
Personally, I hope the DRI project continues on to be a
successful project, and any efforts by anyone to see it does,
hopefully turn out beneficial.
After reading some people's postings on donating X amount of
money for feature Y, and the like, I thought about it and come to
the conclusion that donation driven DRI project even partially is
quite unrealistic. I'd like to discuss why I think that is so.
First off, the number of DRI developers, or developers out there
who could potentially do the work is much lower than one might
expect IMHO. I'm not one of them either. I've been told, and
understably so, that this requires an in depth knowledge of
kernel programming, OpenGL internals, DRI internals, XFree86
internals, and various other things. The number of people out
there who could potentially participate is fairly low compared to
other things such as kernel developement, or other open source
projects.
In order to do this development, it does require both the
hardware needed, and the 3D specifications for that hardware.
While some vendors are more helpful than others, getting ahold of
chip level 3D specs from anyone - as has been stated many times
before, is not easy. There are tonnes of people who are anxious
to help, however I doubt any vendor is anxious to toss out
documentation to tonnes of people. More likely than not, they
would be willing only to give docs to a select few individuals
such as those already part of the DRI team who have direct
experience in this field, and thus have much higher likelyhood of
completing such work.
I'm only trying here to explain how I think it will be difficult
for example for 50 random good natured open source people to
acquire the info they need to even begin, I'm not of course
trying to defend any vendor for anything. Just explaining it as
I see it.
So, docs are going to be hard to come by, and people who could
turn that info into workable drivers even less. As I understand
it, much hardware also requires talking directly to engineers
from the hardware vendor themself to get things going (ie: 3dfx).
Now onto the topic of donations... You're going to have both
people who are willing to work on the project for free, that
aren't interested in donations, as well as those who are going
to want to work on it as their "job". Others will have other
real life jobs, and work on it in their copious spare time.
IMHO the whole idea of being donation-driven, is for the monetary
donations to be a motivator. IMHO, this will not work, and I am
purely being hypothetical here - because those who 'were' being
payed full time to work on the project, are now going to be
looking for other real life full time jobs, and will most likely
get them quickly, or perhaps start up their own businesses, etc.
With the levels of expertise in 3D required by anyone on the DRI
team, it stands to reason that they won't be unemployed for long,
and most likely wont be needing/wanting donations with which to
sustain their car payments. <grin>
So who would the donations be attractive to? Most likely to
those who aren't currently involved, and have the largest
barriers to entry into getting new stuff implemented, possibly
students, etc.
Considering the price of current hardware, a Radeon VE could be
purchased for $61 on pricewatch right now, and I'm sure other
hardware is even cheaper. I think anyone would be more likely to
spend that $61 and have a working card, than to say spend $20
donating into a fund to get SLI mode working on their current
Voodoo 5 of which likely wont ever happen for various reasons.
Who would gather these donations? How many people out there are
using Linux that would be willing to donate to some sort of
effort like this? Again, I have no idea, but my mind tells me
"very few". I would be surprised if $2000 could be raised in any
reasonable amount of time and dedicated to one single project
goal. $2000 isn't much of a motivator to someone with the skills
that could pull off implementation of whatever it is they'd be
working on IMHO.
In reality, I see DRI proceeding only via the efforts of the
current project team, and occasional new members and open source
developers such as those exploring the Mach64 right now. I don't
think any major strides are going to come from the general public
of developers due to the specialization of skill, and access to
what is very much proprietary information that is required with
which to do the work.
I could be totally wrong however, and I *hope* that I am.
Perhaps this message will be a big motivator for someone to go
gung ho organizing such a donation oriented project, and prove my
theory/hypothesis/bs opinion wrong. ;o)
Only through tight collaboration of DRI members, new developers
interested in joining or working on the code, positive
interaction with vendors, and being *patient* and very
understanding of vendors positions, will DRI succeed.
Again, this is all in my own personal opinion, not shared by Red
Hat, anyone else on the list, my Mom, or the Pizza delivery guy.
Gotta go now, pizza is here.
TTYL
P.S. My intention of this posting, is to stimulate discussion.
I'll probably get flamed also, which is ok - it happens. I'm
hoping it will generate some good positive discussion on how to
breathe new life into things.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
XFree86 maintainer Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
Red Hat Inc. Phone: (705)949-2136
http://www.redhat.com ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
Red Hat XFree86 mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
IRC: #redhat-xfree86 on irc.openprojects.org
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