Originally posted by duby229
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When AMD has a real, working driver that's actually ready (for the highly adventurous) to use, it would of course be useful for said driver to be Open. Right now, I can't possibly imagine any contribution anybody is going to make that is going to be remotely helpful, especially when you consider that almost every skilled and interested developer is already working on the project through AMD, Novell, or Red Hat.
Aside from the core developers of the projects, there isn't a flood of people submitting useful stuff to Intel, nor a mass of talented hackers improving the existing ATI driver, nor a group of rockstar coders bringing the Nouveau driver into a useful state. When the new AMD driver is finally Opened up, I will bet you money that every single truly useful and noteworthy contribution is going to continue coming from the exact same people working on the private repos right now. Just like the Intel driver is still developed almost exclusively by people with an @intel.com or @redhat.com email address.
Yes, AMD will certainly benefit in the long term from having an Open Source driver. No, I do not believe that AMD would benefit from having an Open Source repo of experimental demo code and a bunch of inaccurate and incomplete hardware documentation available to the public.
Most projects don't actually put any code or docs up until they have something actually useful. The kind of developer that makes a public repo the day he starts a project is the kind of developer that abandons his SourceForge account with a still-empty CVS repo six months after he created it. The only reason we're even having this conversation at all is that AMD is publicizing this project before it's at a useful stage, which is uncommon. Most projects materialize on the Internet as an already partially-useful code drop; I see no reason why AMD's driver should be any different just because it's high profile.
Heck, let's play it your way. I have some new AMD driver code! Send in your patches so we can get this rolling ASAP! Here's what I have so far:
Code:
/* AMD driver. Copyright (C) 2008 Everyone. Released under the X license. */ #include <stdio.h> int main(int argc, char **argv) { printf("I'm an AMD driver project. Release early, release often!\n"); }
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