Re: Proposal: Keep non-free
On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 07:27:28PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> On 2004-02-23 19:57:21 +0000 Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
> wrote:
>
> >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,
> >[...]
>
> Given your previous comments about the unicorn device and your role
> with XFree86, I had hoped that you would help us.
There is nothing that can be done in small scale. The graphic card
vendors have clearly said that nothing will make them consider freeing
their drivers. NVidia never released specs, and it seems ATI was not
content with the previous round of DRI drivers (for the R100 and R200
based cards), and decided to do it the NVidia way.
> Possibly dropping non-free will not influence them or encourage free
> software alternatives, but not dropping it definitely won't.
Their market is the windows market, they have clearly said that not even
the whole summ of all debian installs would be enough to cover the cost
for them, or some other such non-sense. This is a case were insuficient
people with the knowledge and time to work on free 3D drivers has lost
us access to the specs in the future. And i can assure you that they
will not even notice us dropping non-free, nor care in any way.
The whole hope i see, would be for someone with load of money to get the
specs and to pay for the development of said driver. Notice also, that
the company i work for, and which does a proprietary closed source OS
for powerpc hardware, tried to get access to those specs from ATI, but
didn't get it, nor does XiG have access to those R300 specs, so again, i
really doubt that there is a free 3D accel future, and the droping of
non-free would only serve to hurt our users.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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