Re: G3's, G4's, Altivec, DVD's, iBooks, and TiBooks

[Michel Dänzer <daenzer@debian.org>]

On Thu, 2001-10-25 at 20:58, Rogério Brito wrote:
> On Oct 25 2001, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> > On Thu, 2001-10-25 at 00:19, Michel Lanners wrote: 
> > > - make the iDCT and motion compensation of the ATI chip available under
> > >   Linux. Single most usefull improvement.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, it's also the least likely to happen.
> 
> 	What is the reason for that?

I can only speculate, but I suspect the US jurisdiction.

> 	So, back to the discussion, is it the case that ATI is not
> 	willing to cooperate? I thought that they, together with
> 	Matrox, were some of the more open-source-friendly companies
> 	making video cards.

Absolutely. They provide documentation and hardware to developers, they
submit code to XFree86. Maybe they do even more but that's what I know
about.

> 	Do they have any legal problems releasing the documentation?

I can't think of any other reason why they wouldn't do it.

> 	Would a petition signed by users of the "minority" OSes (say,
> 	users of the many distributions of Linux and the BSDs) be a
> 	sensible notice for ATI that there are people willing to use
> 	their hardware with alternative OSes?

I think they know, see the press release Branden posted.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer (MrCooper)/ Debian GNU/Linux (powerpc) developer
XFree86 and DRI project member   /  CS student, Free Software enthusiast