Re: [OT] Why does X need so much CPU power?
At Tue, 2 Sep 2003 12:31:21 +0200,
Nicos Gollan wrote:
>
> On Tuesday 02 September 2003 06:00, csj wrote:
> > Some ex-X coders have already forked XFree86. There's already an
> > established dri project at sourceforge which is responsible for
> > creating the more bleeding edge 3D support for X (note the use of the
> > relative "more").
>
> Judging from all the other attempts at establishing a new
> graphic frontend, the only thing that will keep Xouvert from
> just vanishing is - sadly - its X heritage. DRI is all nice but
> it lacks vendor support (Radeon 9[5-9]00? no chance unless the
> Weather Channel gets nice once more) and if a vendor is so nice
> to publish drivers there's a guarantee somewhere in the GPL
> (which doesn't even apply to Xfree) that some f***** zealots
> will curse them to hell and back for not being open source.
I'd consider myself a near-zealot. However I don't mind using
closed-source software from the very vendor of a product who has
a monopoly anyway on the manufacture of the product. If the
maker of VideoChip-X regularly provides free-beer binaries for
GNU/Linux, and they're the only ones making it, then good. Such
binaries are no different from firmware that's hardcoded or
flashed into ROM. And we don't see that many people complaining
about the closed source BIOS of their motherboard.
> There's a problem of legacy (X itself) and mentality (hardcore
> GNU dunces) which has been successfully keeping back *nix from
> the masses since inception. It's middle management all over
> again.
I take it to mean that there are non-hardcore GNU dunces? But
isn't GNU supposed to be not Unix? It's part of their master
plan! They want the masses to convert to Hurd/GNU!
Note that there's also the *BSDs. And I don't think their
developers will confess to any substantial debt to the GNU
project, except perhaps for the compiler.
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