Sunday, August 27. 2006
Free Software and marketing
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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.
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 ?!
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 )
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.
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
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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