On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 07:27:28PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > On 2004-02-23 19:57:21 +0000 Sven Luther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > 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
