Free Software and marketing
Sunday, August 27. 2006, 23:41
This friday, there were two driver releases for linux graphics hardware. A new proprietary driver from nvidia and a new free driver for ati cards.
The release of the new nvidia driver was spread over all major news-pages. It's main new feature was the support of Xorg 7.1 just three months after it's release and about five months after the first release candidate. It still doesn't support the main new feature of Xorg 7.1, which is AIGLX. I couldn't find the release of the new free ati driver mentioned anywhere (even on linux news-pages) and probably even wouldn't have noticed if I wouldn't read the xorg-mailinglist. The new ati driver has much improved support for r300 and above chips, which is very important for the future development of 3D-desktops like compiz.
Now, the reason why this happens is probably that nvidia put out a colorful press release when they update their drivers. One could say that it's bad journalism from those news pages (especially if they are linux related) that if they get press releases from companies, they always post news, but they don't do so for rarely announced free releases. But news writers are lazy, if they get some ready-to-publish press release, they'll more likely take it than grabbing some announcement from some developers mailinglist. The problem from many free software projects is that their publicity sucks.
The work done by the xorg-developers to the ati-drivers is great. But I still meet people that even don't know the free drivers support anything above 9200. I never read big announcements on news pages about »free ati driver now supporting new card xy«. Now, if you have a look at the xorg-page, it doesn't even have release announcements. It looks boring. We know that xorg is cool, that it has wobbly windows and such, that development is happening. But looking at the webpage, it much more looks like xfree86.
This problem is not just related to xorg, it's just that I noticed this fact the last days (two driver-releases, only one noted). Same thing was e. g. with ffmpeg supporting h264 for a long time and then I read that some »I-forgot-their-name«-company said they'll bring a commercial h264-codec to linux. Or that about a week after ffmpeg supported wmv9 (also rarely noted by the public), real software said they want to bring wmv-support to linux. There's so much great stuff going on in free software development that would deserve more publicity.
Oh, and for a last note, Lars also has a nice example how not to do it.
The release of the new nvidia driver was spread over all major news-pages. It's main new feature was the support of Xorg 7.1 just three months after it's release and about five months after the first release candidate. It still doesn't support the main new feature of Xorg 7.1, which is AIGLX. I couldn't find the release of the new free ati driver mentioned anywhere (even on linux news-pages) and probably even wouldn't have noticed if I wouldn't read the xorg-mailinglist. The new ati driver has much improved support for r300 and above chips, which is very important for the future development of 3D-desktops like compiz.
Now, the reason why this happens is probably that nvidia put out a colorful press release when they update their drivers. One could say that it's bad journalism from those news pages (especially if they are linux related) that if they get press releases from companies, they always post news, but they don't do so for rarely announced free releases. But news writers are lazy, if they get some ready-to-publish press release, they'll more likely take it than grabbing some announcement from some developers mailinglist. The problem from many free software projects is that their publicity sucks.
The work done by the xorg-developers to the ati-drivers is great. But I still meet people that even don't know the free drivers support anything above 9200. I never read big announcements on news pages about »free ati driver now supporting new card xy«. Now, if you have a look at the xorg-page, it doesn't even have release announcements. It looks boring. We know that xorg is cool, that it has wobbly windows and such, that development is happening. But looking at the webpage, it much more looks like xfree86.
This problem is not just related to xorg, it's just that I noticed this fact the last days (two driver-releases, only one noted). Same thing was e. g. with ffmpeg supporting h264 for a long time and then I read that some »I-forgot-their-name«-company said they'll bring a commercial h264-codec to linux. Or that about a week after ffmpeg supported wmv9 (also rarely noted by the public), real software said they want to bring wmv-support to linux. There's so much great stuff going on in free software development that would deserve more publicity.
Oh, and for a last note, Lars also has a nice example how not to do it.
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Also along with that, I'm really amazed in gnash, that it can do anything. I installed from CVS today and it works oob. Of course it's far from a completely working package but it does more on my amd64 machine than I've seen any other flash do.
#1
Avuton Olrich
on
2006-08-28 05:10
But are we sure we want to make some noise around it ? I can see some reasons why we wouldn't :
1. the drivers, although they're getting better and better, are still considered experimental by the developpers themselves
2. ATi behavior towards open-source isn't one bit better than nvidia, so do we really want to advertise their cards as working well in linux ?
Just to be complete, I can also see some reasons why it would be nice to make more noise about those open-source drivers :
1. more testers
2. it shows how well things could be if ATi gave the r300 devs a hand
3. it could shed more light on the fact that, whatever it is that ATi hides in its proprietary drivers, there's no reasons for them to restrain from giving basic information about a limited set of functionality (basic 2D, basic 3D, initialisation gotchas like the one that made radeon9800 hang so much until now ...)
So, what do we really want ?!
1. the drivers, although they're getting better and better, are still considered experimental by the developpers themselves
2. ATi behavior towards open-source isn't one bit better than nvidia, so do we really want to advertise their cards as working well in linux ?
Just to be complete, I can also see some reasons why it would be nice to make more noise about those open-source drivers :
1. more testers
2. it shows how well things could be if ATi gave the r300 devs a hand
3. it could shed more light on the fact that, whatever it is that ATi hides in its proprietary drivers, there's no reasons for them to restrain from giving basic information about a limited set of functionality (basic 2D, basic 3D, initialisation gotchas like the one that made radeon9800 hang so much until now ...)
So, what do we really want ?!
#2
M.Pomme
on
2006-08-28 17:23
that's normal - the bigger the project the more obfuscated the main page. (gcc, X, binutils, ffmpeg)
ati drivers have an rss channel with announcements, also some jabber services offer ati announcements, so many people ar e on par with the releases.
ati rss: http://www.ati.com/online/rss/atilinuxdriver.rss?OTC-rssfeedlinux
also linux-games.net notifies of new ati/nvidia drivers really quickly. (with performance tests usually)
ati behavior towards open source is WAY better than nvidia's. they released the specs to older cards. they are making an effort, and it shows because they drivers are rapidly improving.
people working on opensource nvidia driver are alone, and have to do reverse engineering even for cards that nvidia considers "legacy" (NV10, NV20 models, that would be geforce2 and 3, i presume)
their progress:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/NoveauCompanion_1 )
ati drivers have an rss channel with announcements, also some jabber services offer ati announcements, so many people ar e on par with the releases.
ati rss: http://www.ati.com/online/rss/atilinuxdriver.rss?OTC-rssfeedlinux
also linux-games.net notifies of new ati/nvidia drivers really quickly. (with performance tests usually)
ati behavior towards open source is WAY better than nvidia's. they released the specs to older cards. they are making an effort, and it shows because they drivers are rapidly improving.
people working on opensource nvidia driver are alone, and have to do reverse engineering even for cards that nvidia considers "legacy" (NV10, NV20 models, that would be geforce2 and 3, i presume)
their progress:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/NoveauCompanion_1 )
#2.1
yoshi314
on
2006-08-29 10:00
ati behavior towards open source WAS way better than nvidia's. They released the specs to older cards, but now they wouldn't even take a look at an open-source 2D only driver (http://airlied.livejournal.com/31180.html).
open source ati drivers are indeed in a less sad state than open source nvidia drivers, and that may indeed be because of previous cooperation of ATi, but this stopped with directx 9 video card generation.
But really, my point was to ask whether we really want to advertise the open source driver for ati cards so soon, knowing that a user making a buy decision based on this, at this moment, might very well end up with this (http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2006082904-compiz-and-aiglx-on-debian)
I don't have a definite answer to that question.
open source ati drivers are indeed in a less sad state than open source nvidia drivers, and that may indeed be because of previous cooperation of ATi, but this stopped with directx 9 video card generation.
But really, my point was to ask whether we really want to advertise the open source driver for ati cards so soon, knowing that a user making a buy decision based on this, at this moment, might very well end up with this (http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2006082904-compiz-and-aiglx-on-debian)
I don't have a definite answer to that question.
#2.1.1
M.Pomme
on
2006-08-29 20:34
Marketing in this null world IS everything.
"OpenSource what ?!? you mean free dowload? Is what I been replied yesterday by my local hardware gross store, and this is NO good.
If we portray an image of something simple but feature-full that WORKS we have a better chance to attract yet another monkey and to make him/her evolve in someone that may be useful for the entire community of "aware homo".
An image is what always is remembered
"OpenSource what ?!? you mean free dowload? Is what I been replied yesterday by my local hardware gross store, and this is NO good.
If we portray an image of something simple but feature-full that WORKS we have a better chance to attract yet another monkey and to make him/her evolve in someone that may be useful for the entire community of "aware homo".
An image is what always is remembered
#3
Eli Spizzichino
on
2007-03-01 16:02
I just hope for them to add support for the X1300 soon.
I bought it without giving it enough thought, and so I'm stuck with the proprietary drivers (and want to get rid of those as soon as possible).
I bought it without giving it enough thought, and so I'm stuck with the proprietary drivers (and want to get rid of those as soon as possible).
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