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Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)Posted Mar 5, 2013 3:30 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H) by DiegoCG Parent article: Canonical reveals plans to launch Mir display server (The H)
Their were casualties in that war. BSD was almost sued out of existence due to them laying the groundwork for the commercial success of Unix and not anticipating what would happen when shortsightedness, greed, and copyright law collided.
It is one thing to lose out because you made too many mistakes or your product sucked. Its quite another issue when somebody decides to use the government to eliminate the competition... which at that time was free software.
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Worst case scenario: non-free drivers gain acceptance Posted Mar 5, 2013 20:56 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
The worst case scenario this time is that the three compete for functionality and accept non-free drivers as a way to offer more than the others, leading to a race to the bottom while the hardware companies gleefully rub their hands.
Worst case scenario: non-free drivers gain acceptance Posted Mar 6, 2013 2:29 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
We already have a lot closed source video drivers. I don't think it's going to make much of a difference, really.
Worst case scenario: non-free drivers gain acceptance Posted Mar 6, 2013 10:36 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
The current situation isn't actually that bad. It's easy to go out and buy a desktop or laptop that works with 100% free software drivers today. But we're in a dangerous period because of the hardware transition from desktops and laptops to tablets and phones.
When everyone is behind a single display server, it's easier for that project to stand firm and make demands. (Some venal downstream packagers will of course break solidarity.)
But when the users are divided, and when some display servers are controlled by companies, then people who stand firm for free software can get marginalised.
Worst case scenario: non-free drivers gain acceptance Posted Mar 6, 2013 17:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I don't think it will make much of a difference because display servers are moving out of the hardware management business. Any new display server is going to, or should, be using standardized application APIs for it's foundation.
So it should not matter what display server you are using. The display server needs to conform to the APIs provided by low level system libraries and the kernel, not the other way around.
With X windows in Linux the display server had to have it's own driver to drive the hardware directly, which is a idiotic design and is a disaster. It's one of the major reasons open source drivers got so far behind.
Worst case scenario: non-free drivers gain acceptance Posted Mar 6, 2013 19:34 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> With X windows in Linux the display server had to have it's own driver to drive the hardware directly, which is a idiotic design and is a disaster. It's one of the major reasons open source drivers got so far behind.
no, the main reason that open source drivers got so far behind is that they had to reverse engineer everything, vendors were actively hostile to them.
Worst case scenario: non-free drivers gain acceptance Posted Mar 7, 2013 10:38 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
No. Probably THE major reason is the guys with power in XFree86 (not the guys doing the work, they left to form Xorg) said "if you want a gui, use Windows".
Sad but true - I think the final straw was when ?Keith Packard (who had been doing 90% of the coding) had his commit rights withdrawn.
Cheers,
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