[Nottingham] Connect 3D Radeon 7000 AGP and Five Button Mouse info

[Michael Simms]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 06:39 +0100, Michael Quaintance wrote:

> Okay, I'm sorry to butt in here but you've touched on an issue I care 
> deeply about.
> 
> The following is extracted from http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#37 
> and is therefore written from an OpenBSD perspective.
> 
> > For an operating system to get anywhere in "the market" it must have 
> > good device support.

Never a truer word spoken

> > ...[T]he problem was solved by writing drivers for documented devices 
> > first. If the free software user communities use those drivers 
> > preferentially, it is a market loss for the secretive vendors. Another 
> > approach that has worked is to publish email addresses and phone 
> > numbers for the marketing department managers in these companies. 
> > These email campaigns have worked almost every time.

Id like to see a single example of that EVER working, Ive never heard of
it in my 12+ years using linux. Usually if that happens you get the
fanatics and the idiots spamming them threatening them, all kinds of
junk, Ive actually seen Linux support decided AGAINST on the basis of
that kind of thing happening.
Sure if you only get the sensible rational people making contact its
likely to be good. However its never that simple.

> > Send a message that open support for hardware matters. A vendor in 
> > Redmond largely continues their practices because they get the chipset 
> > documentation years before everyone else does. 

Im not aware that anyone in redmond makes graphics card drivers. That is
written by the hardware implimentors.

> What really upsets us 
> > the most is that some Linux vendors are signing Non-Disclosure 
> > Agreements with vendors, or contracts that let them distribute 
> > firmwares. Meanwhile both Linux and FSF head developers are not asking 
> > their communities to help us in our efforts to free development 
> > information for all, but are even going further and telling their 
> > development communities to not work with us at pressuring vendors.

Pressuring people doesnt work. Just who do these people think they are.
They are a sub 1% of the market. Im sorry but a major company only gets
'pressured' by people that have the power to make things harder for
them. We aren't those people. Not in any way that counts, in the wallet.
Sure we can give them some bad press, oh no, the Linux users are feeling
snubbed - who cares! Joe on the street wont shed a tear for us, we arent
that important. We dont have the buying power to pressure anything, we
dont have the voice to pressure anything. What we DO have in *abundance*
is the ability to piss off manufacturers who may have supported us if we
had showed we are a group with wallets, not a group with big mouths.

> Now people may disagree with this and I respect that. I have a hard time 
> balancing what is clearly good about the GPL with what are in my opinion 
> its biggest weaknesses. That said, this conflict comes from the central 
> premise of how do you protect 'forever' against a business changing its 
> mind? I like open-source drivers. More so than the kernel. But then I am 
> a device driver and bootstrap engineer for my day job!

Whats going to be more beneficial. A kernel thats oh so nice and open,
and bugger all works on it, or a kernel thats actually some use?
Dont get me wrong, it would be nice if nvidia opened their drivers, but
who has actually been harmed by them being closed? Not me thats for
sure. The state of open source 3D drivers is abysmal, even those where
we have specs. Why? because if we implement certain features in the
drivers we go right off to jail for not paying royalties on dozens of
patents (thats another argument, I'm not in favour of software patents
but they are a fact of life and we cant just ignore them until the law
changes). We would be left with half-complete drivers that do a so-so
job about a quarter as well as the windows versions. Who do you think
you'll be persuading to move to Linux if its 20% of the speed of a
comparable windows machine.

> Again sorry to butt in as this is quite off-topic and I personally don't 
> care about 3d or games. Most of my boxen are headless anyway. If you 
> can't do it on the console... is it really worth doing at all?

Well, thats your personal view and for you it is fine, but many tens of
thousands of people DO need things like that. I bet many things you use
others would consider pointless and meaningless, but that doesnt make
them less valid to YOU. Dont discount somethings use just because YOU
dont use it.

The vast majority of people that use a PC use it for office products
(word processing, spreadsheets, etc) and games. 1 of those 2  requires
good 3D graphics to run the latest products that people want.

> That said, I may be asking a question shortly about a problem where the 
> console really isn't enough. I need pictures.

If you only want 2D graphics, as I said in a post a while ago, the open
source drivers are *fine*. The initial question was from someone wanting
to know about using a 5 button joystick in the card - Im pretty sure he
isnt using it for text applications or word processing...

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 01:23 +0100, Robert Hart wrote:
> The reasons for having open source drivers are exactly the same as any
> other software, and arguably they are more important for drivers.
> 
> To take the specific example of graphics card:
> 
> 1) the only thing that has ever crashed my linux box has been openGL apps.
> Now admittedly this is happening less and less often as nvidia improve
> their drivers, but I somehow expect that if it were open source this would
> have happened quicker.

Very likely, but on the other hand, if it were open source it would be
missing many many features as mentioned above.

Lets take the old analogy of 'would you buy a car with the front welded down
so you couldnt access the engine'.
Lets look at that another way

which car, at the same price, would you buy:

1) a car with a nice open front so you can go oooohhh ahhh at the engine 
inside that is more complex than you could ever hope to fix

2) a car with a welded down front that goes twice as fast, or maybe uses
half the amount of fuel as car 1.

In EITHER case, you arent going to be fixing it unless you are trained to
do so. One of them is twice as good as the other one. How much do you REALLY
need to go 'ohhhh ahhhh' at that thing in the front that you have no idea how
to fix?

> 2) everybody bitches about X being an outdated graphics system. Personally
> I don't think it's all that bad, but there are lots of people
> experimenting with other ideas and trying to come up with something
> better. Remember choice is good, right? But how can they do that if they
> can't adapt the existing drivers to suit their needs?

I like X. Choice is fine but not always a good thing. Look at Gnome and
KDE. We have half the group that is willing to do that kind of work
duplicating the work of the other half. If we only had one or the other,
we would be twice as far along now. I dont think that more is always
better. I think that in many cases more is worse. How many DIFFERENT ways
are there to do the same damned thing in Linux. You can burn a CD in 5
different apps, you have at least 5 major window managers, and 2 dozen
ways to view images. None are really that much better than any of the
others. Most of them arent pushing their competitors to do better. They
are just clones of each other with buttons in different places or different
commandline options to do the same job.
As an example, when was the last time that the emacs/vi war produced ANYTHING
remotely useful. I dont use a single feature in my text editor that wasnt 
there 10 years ago.

> 3) Making binary-only kernel modules is only borderline acceptable, and
> there are definitely moves by kernel developers to make it harder rather
> than easier to do. This is their right - the kernel has always been GPL,
> and the GPL is pretty clear about linking. This means anybody stuck with a
> closed-source only card could get stuck between a rock and a hard
> place. Want to choose between graphics and that bleeding edge kernel?

It is their right to do that. And if they do many people will go from Linux
back to windows. I may be one of them if they cause enough fallout that
it puts me out of business because none of the games my company makes
work well enough to run any more. Yay for the moralistic viewpoint. Its now
less usable for the things that many people want to use it for. Is that
REALLY a good thing? There are always shades of grey in any situation.

> 4) Even big companies like ATI and nVidia go bust. Then what happens to
> your expensive graphics card? 

Last time I checked, my graphics card didnt check the nvidia stock prices
before deciding whether to work or not.

> Sure if you're lucky they may GPL the driver
> with their dying breath, but then again some competitor may buy them out,
> mop up all the IP and cease support. If you had open-source drivers right
> from the start then you wouldn't have to worry, because you know as long
> as there are users, there will be support.

OK so now look at it another way.

Open source drivers, cant include the patented code that is in them, less use
in the first place. Dont argue that 'well patents are evil' - we KNOW they
are - it doesnt make it any less of a fact of life.

Lets also say you have a card that isnt very common, and has no linux support,
sure maybe you are one of the 2 dozen people in the world capable of
writing a linux 3d device driver from scratch by yourself. Or maybe you would
rather have the company make a closed driver? Or would you rather just throw
the card away and spend MORE money on a new one. Cos I tell you, you'll go 
through a lot of money that way looking for a good open source 3D driver in 
linux. If you find one, let me know.

> > Personally, operating systems and file formats, those are the two things
> > I feel are evil to be closed, anything else by default, has to be on a
> > level playing field and only the best product wins.
> > 
> 
> Exactly, and a graphics driver is part of the operating system. Yes, and
> several people would consider open source to win hands down for their own
> definition of best.

No a driver is not part of the operating system it is an interface between
the operating system and a piece of hardware. Having it closed does NOT lock
you into anything. If I wanted I could go out tomorrow and buy ATI or
matrox graphics cards if I had the urge, and put them into my computer
and they would work. Nothing removes my freedom of choice.

I dont have anything against open drivers. If they did the job I would use them.

They dont.


-- 
Michael Simms - CEO, Tux Games
http://www.tuxgames.com