[Sussex] Linux Heavyweights Sound Off At Summit

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 17:31 +0000, Angelo Servini wrote:
> IMHO is, its time maybe for the Open Source community to address this.  Im all for freedom of choice, but - how fast would a unified desktop advance, if ALL the desktop teams pooled their efforts?

See www.freedesktop.org - we're all singing from the same prayer sheet,
but we all sing slightly differently.

> I read a mail by someone on the ubuntu forums who sounded off to ATI for their crap support of Linux. But, who can blame them.  

I can.  

They refuse to release details of how to use the hardware they sell
people and they justify that by saying "it's OK we'll give you some
closed software to let you use the hardware you buy" - thus people
intending to use a Linux system buy ATI hardware because ATI say it will
work and then find out that the ATI drivers basically don't work at all
reliably in any sense of the word.  Frankly this situation is worse than
ATI not providing drivers at all - they are giving lip service to Linux
purely to try and get their foot in a market that they can't be bothered
to approach sensibly.

Nvidia do the same thing but support it well.  I'd much rather they
released full specs for how to use the hardware they sell and (best of
all) help develop drivers for their hardware under a free software
license, but failing that actually support what they claim to support is
a big thing in their favour.  The reason Nvidia support linux so well is
not because they can make money selling to hundreds of gamers, but
because they can sell to a smaller, but more profitable, graphics
workstation market.  

Until such time as ATI even achieve Nvidia's level of support I have no
option but to advise people to steer well clear of ATI as a bunch of
cowboys.   Frankly ATI are doing nothing but harm to their reputation
right now.

> They perceive the Linux community as a small insignificant group and M$ is king.  

For consumer level PC's this is almost definitely the case right now.
Bear in mind though that Linux has a bigger share of the desktop than
Apple does right now and Apple kit runs ATI and Nvidia hardware.  The
big difference is Apple can sign an NDA with ATI and write their own
drivers.

> They will make a wrong and uninformed choice, and pool all their efforts into supporting the majority OS, as seen by their eyes.  

Don't think serious graphics card manufacturers would ever ignore Linux
- they desperately need to sell their top end cards for massive amounts
of money in the workstation market in order to fund cutting edge
development (see how much a current model NVidia Quadro FX 4400 card
costs) before they push that technology onto the consumer market.  Linux
now _owns_ the workstation market, it has more share than either windows
or the old UNIX kings (Solaris, IRIX, AIX and HP-UX).  

That's the only reason Nvidia and ATI care about Linux at all.

> That is not to diss the good manufacturers like Nvidia and HP, who do go out of their way to produce quality drivers for Linux.

Nvidia don't go out of their way - it's core business.

HP - what drivers do they produce?

> If the Hardware community on the other hand perceive Linux as becoming an up and coming better bet.  Then you will see them burst with activity to provide support.  Its all driven by profit.  

Yup.  

One of the biggest problems with consumer grade hardware is that almost
all of the functionality lives in software these days - Winmodems,
scanners and printers all suffer heavily from this.

The problem is software development is cheaper than hardware development
(so there's more profit) but it's also more transient - a lot of cheap
modems, scanners and printers that came onto the market five years ago
simply won't work with Windows XP never mind Linux - that's because the
companies that made them put all the processing in software and didn't
maintain it beyond the shelf life of the product.

Don't think that drivers are purely a linux problem - they're
increasingly a problem for all platforms only masked by the fact that
consumers rarely upgrade their OS without upgrading their kit (I know
several people still running Win95 and win98 !).

> If linux is to be king, then we need to win the Desktop battle. Thats my 2 denarius, anyhow.

It's coming, but it's slow.  Home desktops are the last place Linux will
take hold - it'll get there if and only if it becomes dominant of
business desktops.  Even if it does end up on most business desktops it
may not drive further adoption because Linux apps work to open standards
and don't preclude interaction with other software (the opposite of
Microsoft's approach which has allowed them to leverage an initial
monopoly of business desktops to gain monopolies in other markets).

If anything the key battle is not getting open source everywhere but
getting open standards everywhere.  Here there is more hope.  It seems
like the worlds legislators are beginning to realise that there's no
point retaining records for 7 years if you have no way to understand the
file at the end of that period.


-- 
Geoffrey Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology