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proprietary X drivers bling (Linux.com)
proprietary X drivers bling (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 15, 2006 8:07 UTC (Wed) by alexl (subscriber, #19068)Parent article: Ubuntu Developer Summit report: X.org improvements, driver controversy, and bling (Linux.com)
This sounds pretty bad for the future of X. If most users used proprietary X drivers its unlikely that there will continue to be anyone working on the free drivers, so they will deteriorate and die. This means that developers won't be able to do any work on X that requires changes to drivers, and X development will come to a standstill.
Do you think ATI or NVidia would spend time creating things like randr2, aiglx, or composite? Of course not, they only do the minimal amount of work needed that is expected for a current X driver.
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proprietary X drivers bling (Linux.com)
Posted Nov 15, 2006 13:15 UTC (Wed) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link]
I agree with this; as it is already the nouveau project could use a lot more help; the same can be said for many of the wireless drivers.
There are GPL drivers out there for most if not all wireless cards. Some just need a bit of loving to make them work well (but not all that much).
It's the ease of cheaping out that holds all these things back...
and look at it from the other side: why would a vendor open source ANY driver in the future now? What is the advantage for them if their competition can stay closed and get even better support than the open drivers?
This is dangerously going into the direction where Linux will have no open drivers at all soon, at which point the entire development will come to a grinding halt.