>Money ... >Future sales, demand. >(previous customers do not count?) > >
Totally replacing Xsun and moving to Xorg would definitely be possible on Solaris_sparc too, just as it has been on x86/x64 (admittedly with certain added difficulty, due to FCode card initialisation instead PC-Bios). (+) I mean, Xsun drivers do already exist for each SUNW frame buffer, what is so expensive or difficult in porting them to Xorg?? (This is a question.) (I understand that those drivers cannot be open-sourced easily, so SUNW's X11 group needed to do that work internally and only deliver binary components to the outside [or would this violate Xorg's license(s)? - I do not think so]. Marketing/Sales group only needed to give green light, I guess. (+) SUNW's X11 group could offer to do the required porting work for free, to minimize costs. Marketing/Sales people would probably love that. Interested "amateur" community members could be involved in testing and reporting bugs. OpenGL might be another issue? But what else? Without help from SUNW, more recent cards (all XVR cards [except the ati_radeon based XVR-100], Expert3D[lite]) can not be driven by Xorg. I.e. no open source driver for the wildcat* series seems to exist, and there is also a lack of detailed enough data sheets, so how could anyone from the outside ever write a driver? (Still wondering, how Jakub Jelinek and friends managed to write XFree86's sunffb and sunleo drivers back then in 2001.) The newer cards are a black box and only either SUNW or the original chipset designers/manufacturers would be able to produce Xorg drivers for those, by porting the existing drivers. No open-sourcing required. Isn't it much more expensive for SUNW (from the commercial standpoint) to continue maintaining Xsun on sparc? Or is SPARC considered "dead" behind closed doors? -- Best regards, Martin Bochnig
