new driver? why? openchrome! [LWN.net]

new driver? why? openchrome!

Posted Aug 30, 2008 16:17 UTC (Sat) by undefined (guest, #40876)
Parent article: VIA releases open source Xorg driver

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).

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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
http://www.x.org/wiki/AMDGeodeDriver
December 2007 AMD's geode driver was in similar bad shape, with no community coordination or public mailing list of its own. I kicked AMD, and Jordan Crouse moved their previously internal AMD mailing list to public at X.org, and we together wrote all information plus the roadmap on an X.org wiki page. VIA must take steps like this to fully engage with the community, or they will never compete with the competition and achieve "Just Working" drivers shipped in all Linux distributions by default.

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
> that driver, since that would further fragment the various groups
> working on VIA graphics support.

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.