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Re: VGA cards



On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 13:24:07 -0800, Kelly Clowers wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:09, Camaleón wrote:

>>> On the contrary, ATI gives us all this: http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/ and
>>> Intel gives us at least this: http://www.x.org/docs/intel/ But Nvidia
>>> gives nothing at all.
>>
>> Still far from a perfect approach: I would not put my hand into the
>> fire for ATI :-(
> 
> So what, you want AMD to hire a bunch of devs to write a complete open
> source driver? They can't afford to do that.

They couldn't do that... although they wanted.

AMD has not released the full 3D specifications for their drivers, only 
*partial documentation* for some of their chipsets, so even with 100 
dedicated engineers working on ATI drivers, we still have an incomplete 
open source driver.

>From AMD website [1]:

***
Is complete driver source code available?

A4: 	Some of the technologies supported in our driver are protected by 
non-disclosure agreements with third parties, so we cannot legally 
release the complete source code to our driver. It is NOT open source. We 
do, however, include source code for the control panel and certain other 
public segments. We also actively assist developers in the Open Source 
community with their work, so if you absolutely require an open source 
driver for your graphics card, we can recommend using drivers from the 
DRI project, Utah-GLX project, or others.
***

I am not seeing here nothing but the same "arguments" provided by nvidia 
and other supposed "linux-friendly" hardware vendors out there.

> What they have done is fantastic and really about the very best that can
> reasonably be expected.

Well, yes. 

But AMD could do more for its Linux users and in fact, does not :-(

[1] http://ati.amd.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#4

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón


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