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VIA releases open source Xorg driver
Harald Welte reports
in a blog post that VIA has released an open source Xorg driver for
their integrated graphics chips. "I am very happy to see this! It's
one more step that VIA has been working on to improve and show their
support for Free Software and Linux. Please notice that this driver (as
opposed to VIA's proprietary binary-only Xorg driver) has no support for
3D, hardware video codec or TV encoder support. Nevertheless, it is a big
step ahead."
(Log in to post comments)
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 21:03 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
Well, it's a start. I just had to jump through hoops to get 2D working on my VIA Chrome9 HC IGP equipped MB. And yet more hoops to get it going with anything better than the vesa driver. It's hardly a new chipset. But it required the very latest OpenChrome driver from svn, compiled from source, to work.
Surely, VIA has the resources to get with the program faster than they are doing. Especially since their chipsets aren't exactly the advanced 3d monsters that NVidia and AMD make.
VIA did have send a representative to the (Linux Foundation?) Collaboration Conference. And he said a curious thing. IIRC, he said that as a Taiwanese company, its hard for them to participate in open source. Now what's that supposed to mean? They certainly don't have any problems, as a Taiwanese company, getting their goods to market, world wide, for people to buy... and then find out don't work with their OS.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 21:08 UTC (Fri) by wblew (subscriber, #39088) [Link]
One point: is it expected that everybody, worldwide, that wants to participate in open source, be a fluent english speaker?
Based on the lingua franca of the mailing lists, I would assume the answer is: yes
If this is the case, would that not be one barrier?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 21:55 UTC (Fri) by bmur (guest, #52954) [Link]
By virtue of writing C code, don't they need basic english to be a programmer?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 22:35 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] No, you don't need to know English to write C. You need to know the meaning of a few keywords that happen to be English words, but that's a far cry from being able to communicate in English.Over the years I've seen a lot of code where the comments, variable names, etc. are chosen from some other language.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 11:38 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
But then again, the variables and comments in the code of the kernel, xorg and such are English. Don't those porgrammers neer to check the source of the larger programs that they write for?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 15:02 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Sometimes, yes but people can manage without understanding all of it. When Staroffice was released under a free software license, it used to have lots of comments in German and it probably still has but despite that people have managed to understand the code and contribute improvements. The situation for non English speakers is comparable. Also, for many of them, they do understand English to some extend but they are not comfortable speaking in a public forum which is going to be archived pretty much forever.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 19:19 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
Would it not be the same with proprietary software -- the SDKs and documentation will mostly be in English?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 2:47 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
This is by no means a open source specific issue however proprietary software organizations might be able to buffer it by moving people between sites and there is less of a cultural shock and fear associated with the whole process. The local education system also plays a important role here
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 8:05 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Speaking of Microsoft, most of their books are (well) translated to other languages (Spanish here). Also, all of the online documentation is automatically (crappy) translated. This reduces the entrance barrier for new developers considerably.
Regarding English, the distance from being able to read to being able to express yourself is considerable. I haven't been to Taiwan, but in mainland China the percentage of people that can read English is very small.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 20:25 UTC (Sun) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]
You need to know more than "a few keywords". Any non-trivial program will draw heavily on libraries (starting with the standard libraries) which have APIs generally written in English. Note that the classic, trivial "Hello World" program which starts the most famous introductory book to C in the world uses only one word that is (arguably) a keyword (#include, which is really part of the preprocessor, not, technically, a core keyword). Although you can substitute whatever you want for the text string "Hello World", to understand even this simplest of C programs, you need to recognize the English words "include", "main" and "print" (the latter in a confusing form with an extra letter on the end). And you still haven't gotten to the keywords.
And, of course, without a knowledge of English, the fact that "stdio" might be short for "standard input/output" will be completely lost on you. (Even with English, this might not be obvious at first.)
Ironically, because the default locale is 8-bit ascii, you'll need to know <em>more</em> English words to write a program that works in another language than you would to write one that works in English. At a minimum, you'll need to learn "locale" and "set". Neither of which, again, are keywords or even parts of keywords. :)
This isn't to say that you <em>can't</em> learn to program in C with only a bare minimum knowledge of English--we've both seen it done. But the bar is still higher than you suggest--"a few keywords" is far from sufficient.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 14:45 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] ASCII is 7-bit. The default locale is usually asked during the installation. In Fedora, it's en_US.UTF-8.
Non-English-speaking programmers Posted Sep 4, 2008 5:55 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
xtifr claims, essentially, that one cannot program in C well without knowing English. This is manifestly false; a very great deal of good C code is written by people who don't speak any English. They have to work harder, but many people are capable of working hard. They may depend occasionally on an English-speaking colleague, but one such colleague can serve many programmers.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 4, 2008 8:39 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
Sure. But these are domain-spesific words. Knowing and recognizing them are different from knowing the language in general.
You may need to understand what printf, strstr, mutex, heap, CreateNode, while, string, for and a lot of stuff like that means.
But the fact that these are origined in english is almost completely unimportant, a non-programming english-native would not be able to tell what a "heap" or a "mutex" is in this context any better than a non-programming Indian or Norwegian or whatever.
When he -does- learn programming, he also learns the spesific meaning of the most common words, he learns more when he uses libraries etc. But here's the thing; this spesific meaning is so specialised that knowledge of what the word means in everyday english is almost completely irrelevant.
It's -not- much easier to learn what a "heap" is in programming-context if you're a native english-speaker than it is if you know no english at all.
Try asking your grandmother (assuming she is english native, and does no programming) what a "string" or a "heap" is. You'll get an answer, but not one that would help much in understanding a C-program.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 4, 2008 9:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
But when you're writing code you have to *come up* with names as well. In
a lot of languages it's still impossible to come up with names in your native language (C only recently gained support for Unicode identifiers, for instance), so you're going to have to come up with names in, probably, English. And that's harder than learning a bunch of names by rote.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 5, 2008 12:14 UTC (Fri) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]
It's still not that hard. Plus, in many MANY languages outside of english, you can easily write in ascii.
German, Norwegian, French, Italian and Spanish all have a few extra letters and/or apostrophes or whatever. Nevertheless it's simple to use norwegian (or german, or italian) names for variables, functions and components.
Even if you -do- decide to use english names, that's STILL not equivalent to needing to know the language. You don't need hearing-comprehension (harder than reading-comprehension for many) you don't need grammar. You don't need pronounciation. You don't need comma-rules, capitalization-rules etc etc etc.
Learning a few nouns and a few verbs isn't more than a small part of learning a language.
Knowing english is helpful. It's in no way required.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 21:59 UTC (Fri) by mstefani (subscriber, #31644) [Link]
That's a problem but a smaller one.
The big problem is the culture difference. Sending a patch and getting the typical rough response back would make them loose their face in front of their colleagues.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 22:08 UTC (Fri) by wblew (subscriber, #39088) [Link]
Agreed, on the cultural differences. I think that the barriers spoken of are real, and tangible. IMO to pretend that they do not exist, is somewhat naive.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 29, 2008 22:37 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Which is why VIA was wise to hire Harald Welte to help with the communication and getting the code merged. Other companies would be wise to do the same (hire experienced open source people to help bridge the cultural gap).
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 5:51 UTC (Sat) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
There is a sizable FLOSS community in spanish-speaking countries, and at Debconf mexico I met some developers spanish-speaking developers who didn't speak english at all. So certainly it's possible, if perhaps not very convinient, to be participate without english skills.
As another anecdote, I was planning to buy a Linux-based STB (dbox2), and turned out the community spoke and documented everything only in german. Eventually I managed to decipher enough from the forums that dbox2 was missing a feature I needed, but it was quite enlightening experience.
With the for example recent translation of kernel docs to Chinese, I presume the trend is only going to continue, creating more and more code and documentation that is not available in english (unless someone translates it first).
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 6:47 UTC (Sat) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]
first of all: all european languages are somewhat similar to each other. especially the latin-derived/influenced one. and they all share one script.
so please don't compare the spanish/english situation to a chinese/english situation.
much more difficult is the culture. European or in general 'western' culture is fundemantally different in so many ways. And you cannot really understand a different language without understanding a bit of the culture, too.
I'm not just referring to actual 'culture of the people' but also corporate and industry culture.
Chinese <> English/Western culture differences Posted Aug 30, 2008 13:51 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]
I was raised with exposure to other cultures, African, European, USian,
but nothing eastern, so it has always intrigued me.
Consider just one thing by itself, how characters translate into words
So yes, I can certainly see how culture and world-view would
Hiring Harald Welte as a liaison will certainly benefit both Via and the
That said, as a purely practical matter, until they started making this
But I'm glad that's changing as it's nice to have choices! =:^)
Duncan
Chinese <> English/Western culture differences Posted Aug 30, 2008 21:11 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Chinese logograms (which I guess is what you're thinking of) don't really quite have a word-symbol equivalence. You could compare them to the prefixes and suffixes (often stolen from Latin or Greek) which are used to coin some new words in English, e.g. take television, it's one English word, but there are two meaningful components, "tele" and "vision". Most Chinese words are made up of more than one logogram*. As in English, sometimes the resulting word assembled in this way takes on a meaning very different from the literal reading of the component parts.
When importing words from other languages to Chinese a phonetic transliteration is often used, where the characters are chosen based on how they sound, rather than what they mean. The beverage "Coca-cola" is represented 可口可乐. Visually this could also be a short phrase, but no literate Chinese person would make that mistake.
[Grr, LWN previews seem to be broken for Unicode input, the above is U+53EF U+53E3 U+53EF U+4E50]
* And the logograms are themselves often made up of several components, which were originally, thousands of years ago, pictures directly representing ideas or objects.
Documentation as (self-extracting) .exe files? Posted Aug 31, 2008 1:58 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]
I've come across a few of those, and just out of boredom once I tried
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 7:51 UTC (Sun) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]
It's amazing how often I'm able to understand technical discussions in Indo-European languages I don't know using only cognates and technical terms.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 11:40 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
That depends as much as anything on the writing system employed. I have no
hope of understanding anything in Russian or Eastern European languages where the conventional writing system is Cyrillic, because similar though Cyrillic is to the Latin alphabet it's not similar enough to be readable. (Not to me, at least.)
(Of course, if I actually cared about this I suppose I could always learn
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 15:10 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
Test case for your statement: Turkish. Written in a Latin script. Language is completely different from anything European.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 19:17 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Test case for your statement: Turkish. Written in a Latin script. Language is completely different from anything European. From anything? Actually Finnish (my native language), Sami, Estonian, Hungarian, Basque, and probably some others I forgot are also European languages (i.e. they are natively spoken in Europe), but as different from the Indo-European languages as Turkish is.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 0:51 UTC (Mon) by quotemstr (subscriber, #45331) [Link]
That's a good point. I'm not able to understand a word of Greek or Russian without the babelfish's help. But oddly enough, I hardly ever see technical discussions in Greek. And the Russians tend to use English.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 12:24 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
Most eastern European/Slavic languages actually use the latin alphabet. (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, et. al)
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 31, 2008 15:02 UTC (Sun) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
> so please don't compare the spanish/english situation to a chinese/english situation.
That was most certainly not my intention. I was just sharing my thoughts (as answer to the original poster), that it seems possible (but certainly no easy) these days to participate in FLOSS community without knowing English.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 15:44 UTC (Mon) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]
Yes, and yes :-(
But there is little we can do about it. Localized development efforts (i.e. those that are not ready to work internationally) in FOSS usually either die quickly, or cannot be reached at all by non-locals.
If you do any sort of FOSS development, you HAVE to be able to communicate in english if you want your project to succeed (or to work with the vast majority of the FOSS communities and projects out there), and that's the beginning and end of it.
For users, things are less strict, but the moment you want to become an advanced user and that starts requiring access to in-depth documentation and other advanced users, chances are you will need to be able to communicate in english for most projects/applications.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Aug 30, 2008 0:08 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]
And it works. On my 64 bit Ubuntu 8.04 Chrome9 system it (the beta version) compiled right up and, so far, seems to be working about as well as openchrome.
new driver? why? openchrome! Posted Aug 30, 2008 16:17 UTC (Sat) by undefined (guest, #40876) [Link]
why did they release a new driver and not improve upon openchrome (imho, the best out of the via binary driver, the previous via open source driver, unichrome, & openchrome). openchrome is a fork of unichrome which was a fork of the previous via open source driver, so it's not like the code is totally foreign to via.
hopefully harald told via "the first thing you need to know about free & open source software, after making the development process transparent, is building a community". but you don't build a community by apparently ignoring existing attempts to support your hardware (openchrome & unichrome).
maybe they extended an invitation to the openchrome developers, but if so, then i haven't heard about it (while loosely following openchrome development).
new driver? why? openchrome! Posted Aug 30, 2008 19:27 UTC (Sat) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]
I totally haven't followed the details, but there seems to be a lot of bad blood between VIA and huge egos behind the *chrome forks.
Whatever happens, VIA needs to develop the driver in the open perhaps in X.org git repositories like all the other drivers.
http://wtogami.livejournal.com/21926.html
new driver? why? openchrome! Posted Aug 31, 2008 2:19 UTC (Sun) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]
The drive is not "new". It is "new" that this driver is available in source code. VIA already used this very codebase (plus some proprietary 3D and TVout bits) to build their closed source Xorg drivers during recent years. Those drivers were (and still are) available for certain distributions.
So this should explain that this is not "a new driver" but actually something that has been around for many years.
And openly publishing the source of this driver is obviously just the first step. Now all involved parties can look at everyone's source base, and can start a discussion on how to proceed from here.
I would rather not see VIA trying to build a new community around that driver, since that would further fragment the various groups working on VIA graphics support.
new driver? why? openchrome! Posted Aug 31, 2008 3:46 UTC (Sun) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]
> And openly publishing the source of this driver is obviously just the
> first step. Now all involved parties can look at everyone's source > base, and can start a discussion on how to proceed from here.
> I would rather not see VIA trying to build a new community around
These comments are confusing. Does this mean the goal is NOT to create a single centralized and openly developed driver project? Please see my previous comment in this thread.
new driver? why? openchrome! Posted Aug 31, 2008 8:10 UTC (Sun) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]
I don't see any confusing statement.
I was merely saying that I would not think it was good to create a new, separate development community around this newly-opensource driver, but rather see integration with the existing open source community around VIA's graphics products.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 1, 2008 4:29 UTC (Mon) by bdagit (guest, #53691) [Link]
the existence of comments in the source code in languages besides english begs the question, if source code and foreign languages are free speech, why is there no open language movement or why is language proprietary?
the openness to grant someone the right to communicate in a foreign language in your midst, which is a given, is exploited if the speaker only does that to insure exclusivity and privacy, and makes no effort to share the 'source code' of their language. free learning materials for that language, and some kind of free clearinghouse for practice partners are appropriate. i honestly doubt that 2 countries are friends or even on speaking terms if there is no agreement to mutually establish the exchange of free language-learning materials. when you choose your desktop locale, you should be offered free language-training materials with the localization. that is free speech and respect for other languages. let me note that programs like kvoctrain and kwordquiz are capable of helping to build foreign language vocabulary skills. however, i have not found a useful trove of vocabulary files except for a few languages. in addition, i would like to see tons more useful parallel texts online.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 1, 2008 5:25 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
Languages, in practice, may be exclusive. No natural languages are proprietary. I'm not sure what you're driving at.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 1, 2008 6:16 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Some groups speaking obscure languages have tried to claim proprietary
rights over their languages, generally so they can forbid outsiders from speaking it or try to control what's said in it.
None of these claims have been tested in court, all have been met with
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 3, 2008 22:09 UTC (Wed) by bdagit (guest, #53691) [Link]
it's just diversity, which will invigorate the community and spread freedom. in case you didn't know, alot of people who shun linux in favor of proprietary software might do so because they don't trust the idea of programmers talking over their heads. programming languages are foreign to them as much as spoken foreign languages.
foreign languages exist because of geography and politics and taste. the geography and politics are why they are exclusive. i was only saying that foreign languages that cost more than just the minimum to learn with self-study are analogous to expensive proprietary software versus the cost of burning a cdrom with free software. once usable learning materials are available freely and openly, nobody will have to pay anything more than the time and work to learn the language. the freedom in linux and the notion of source code as protected free speech is where this analogy springs from. as of now, if there are no gpl'd foreign language instructional materials which at least cover up to the foreign language comments in the code, such comments are effectively like free proprietary binary snippets tainting the gpl.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 1, 2008 16:00 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Try Klingon.
There's plenty of freely available learning material out there.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 5, 2008 12:15 UTC (Fri) by Oddscurity (guest, #46851) [Link]
"[PATCH] adds mod_tlhIngan: yIDoghQo'"
Indeed... hilarity ensues?
VIA releases open source Xorg driver: Forking the english language documentation Posted Sep 11, 2008 4:31 UTC (Thu) by bdagit (guest, #53691) [Link]
i think most countries (governed in language X) of sufficently ample means offer some kind of free night school courses to learn X as a second language. they would improve this service by offering the learning materials online. if you lived just across the border, you would be welcome to attend these courses, but why not, then, offer at least some online materials for neighbors too distant to commute to the free class. there is no decent reason to avoid this conclusion, open source should be extended to language learning materials.
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 7:32 UTC (Mon) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]
what was the point of releasing a brain dead driver this is yet another xase of give em something just to placate them for now dont be taken in .
VIA releases open source Xorg driver Posted Sep 1, 2008 12:27 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
Release early, release often?
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