VIA Will Not Provide An OSS Chrome 9 3D Driver

[susikala]

Now that's a pity. I was really looking into buying the Samsung NC20... it looks like a nice little thing. :/

[Ant P.]

I wonder what's keeping VIA alive at this point? Microsoft bribes?

Their hardware hasn't been worth buying for a long time - other IGPs are already good enough for Windows users who are only interested in shiny window borders, and their track record of instability makes it unacceptable for people who want their OS to actually work.

[Ex-Cyber]

I wonder what's keeping VIA alive at this point? Microsoft bribes?

Probably just coasting on past successes. They seem to be losing money, but it also seems that they've been able to more or less afford it so far. I'm no business expert, but I get the impression that they'll fold if they don't score a major success in the next few years or so. OTOH, maybe the parent company (a major Taiwanese chemical conglomerate) will decide to keep them around just for the sake of having a local vendor of PC platform chips...

[zoomblab]

I think that we should be thankful for those companies that have given open source drivers and documentation, but also respect the choise of those others that are unwilling or unable to do so. Free software is more like a GIFT than a vested right!

For the record, I own a VIA EPIA SN motherboard and I know first hand how bad their drivers are. All in all I find this "EITHER open source/documentation OR we crucify you" mentality harmful.

[Max Spain]

I wonder what's keeping VIA alive at this point? Microsoft bribes?

I have no idea of that but they did join M$ on the hardware DRM issue around the time when Vista came out.

VIA has taken a novel approach to security that deviates greatly from current DRM-driven industry trends. Instead of siding with the decidedly unpopular requests of the music and movie industry and implementing "sneakware" technology that prevents fair use copying (and even provides backdoors that can potentially allow governments and big businesses to secretly snoop the bits of your drive) VIA provides a plethora of extremely powerful hardware based security features that empower the end user, while remaining flexible enough to be used by content providers - without any sneakware.

I purchased a VIA based system back then because of this stance. These days Trusted Computing tech is inside their Nano CPU's and many of their mobos have TPM's It appears to me that Via believed that their M$ customers were in the majority and so they hung their other customers out dry, but I can't think of anybody who would ever want to buy a Via system to run a M$ OS (especially Vista.)

[Ex-Cyber]

I think that we should be thankful for those companies that have given open source drivers and documentation, but also respect the choise of those others that are unwilling or unable to do so. Free software is more like a GIFT than a vested right!

They have the right to make it a pain in the ass for open-source operating systems to support their hardware, and I have the right to spend my money somewhere else and tell others my reasons for doing so.

[Ant P.]

Free software is more like a GIFT than a vested right!

Limited copyright is a gift. Some greedy companies see eternal copyright as their right.

[Adarion]

They have the right to make it a pain in the ass for open-source operating systems to support their hardware, and I have the right to spend my money somewhere else and tell others my reasons for doing so.

Yep. Exactly.

By the way also Windows users suffer from closed drivers, I remember the many hassels I heard people had when older Windows versions were no more supported or when and older hardware would not run in a newer Windows environment. Or if a driver was shoddy and nobody could repair it.

Iirc. a faulty printer driver (closed source) was the reason for rms to found the fsf. Nobody could fix it and the manufracturer did not want to.

[Chad Page]

I hope you understand that is not happening before 2011.

Hardly... AMD has their own people working on it - glxgears is (kinda) working in Mesa master on 4xxx's now. I think the driver'll be in good shape in Ubuntu 10.04, if not even 9.10.

[SarahKH]

I remember many months ago when VIA were releasing the documentation that I said words to the effect of: VIA will dump some/the documentation then sit back and go "why should we? Here's the documentation you do it".

I. Was. Right.

VIA's products in recent years have yet to impress me. From the mini-ITX board that died after 6 months of use (1 year + in storeage so no warranty) due to bad caps, the SATA controller that wouldn't see SATA drives through to an old super socket 7 board who's AGP port wasn't quite as up to the specifications as it ought to have been.

VIA, SiS and PC Chips (are they even still around?) wouldn't touch any of them with a barge pole personally.