On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, JONATHAN DINERSTEIN wrote:
> >I don't like the idea of giving Mesa away for SGI to act as gatekeeper.
> >
> >I think we have to think more in terms of pulling stuff out of SI and
> >into Mesa - if the license can be straightened out in *that* direction.
>
> I can agree with your concern, but my worry is such a fork in development
> efforts. It would be like KDE and Gnome ... why spread out development efforts
> and end up with two lesser systems when one excellent one could be developed?
I agree - but right now, I can't think of a reason to work on the SGI code.
*IF* a bunch of IHV's are prompted to release their specific adaptations
of this code to their hardware into the public domain, *THEN* it might
be interesting to dive into them to fix bugs or optimise them.
However, the base code as provided by SGI may well be totally unrecognisable
in the releases that (say) nVidia might make.
SGI say:
"How does the Sample Implementation compare to Mesa?
We believe the Sample Implementation is strong in areas such as internal state
management as well as complete feature coverage (such as the optional imaging
features of the OpenGL 1.2 Specification, which Mesa does not provide). By
comparision to the currently distributed SI, Mesa will probably provide better
software rendering performance, and there are existing open-source hardware
drivers projects based on Mesa.
...so apart from this strength in the area of "internal state management",
I can't see any particular reason for an OpenSource developer to 'jump ship'
and work on the SI instead of Mesa.
I don't think the existance of the SI as an independently maintained
OpenGL-clone (can't call it OpenGL - remember) is all that rosy. The
key to this announcement is that the other IHV's can now OpenSource
*their* drivers - and I'll bet that's why SGI released it.
> In part, I'm thinking about the benefit that could come to OpenGL in general.
> Open source development of OpenGL could be used by any vendor, so work done by
> the Mesa team on OpenGL would benefit more than just Linux users. I dunno, my
> two cents.
Mesa has gained popularity under Linux by being the only free implementation
we have. Under Windoze, it had brief popularity for 3Dfx because their was
no full OpenGL for those cards and Mesa could do the job. Now 3Dfx have
fixed that situation, hardly anyone uses Mesa under Windoze. A similar
story applies to Mac's...we were the only game in town - and now there
is an officially sanctioned Apple implementation.
There are a couple of other 'fringe' markets where Mesa is useful - but I
think those were always a very tiny proportion of our users.
So, I think Mesa will continue to be the "OpenGL" of choice for Linux - and
we should look on this SGI release as a 'code mine' from which we may perhaps
extract some nuggets such as the imaging extension.
Steve Baker (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
Raytheon Systems Inc. (817)619-2466 (Fax)
Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.hti.com
Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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