Re: Proposal: Keep non-free
On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 04:16:46PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-02-23 16:21:29 +0000 Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
> wrote:
>
> >I suppose that Sean's comment was in light of both ATI and NVidia,
> >being
> >the two major graphic card vendors out there, decision to no more
> >provide documentation for their recent graphic card, thus meaning the
> >death of 3D support using free software only, and furthermore the
> >death
> >of 3D support on non-x86.
>
> Then we will have the death of the Debian operating system's 3D
> support, regardless of whether non-free remains in the archive. I
> think it is a shame if two graphic card vendors could persuade some
> Debian developers that the project should forever support non-free.
Well, if you manage to persuade those players, and a bunch of other
binary-only driver writers, to free their stuff, more power to you, but
i seriously don't think that the droping of non-free will be even
noticed by them, they most assuredly will not care, so the only one hurt
are the users who happen to have this hardware, which they cannot easily
run debian on. This doesn't include only graphic hardware, but a whole
bunch of other hardware, like my softADSL pci modem, or the Airport
Extreme wifi card of newer Apple laptops, but for those you can usually
chose another solution, but ATI and NVidia have more or less a monopole
in the graphical market, and there is nothing we can do for this.
> There was some talk about X on GL being a possible future: does that
> relate to this? Feel free to move this elsewhere, but please cc me.
I haven't heard of it, but if there is no low level driver because the
manufacturers don't release specs for free alternatives, then this is
moot, as there will be no accelerated OpenGL to run this X or cairo or
whatever on.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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