ATI R300 Mesa, Gallium3D Compared To Catalyst

[Svartalf]

The switch from wanting to contributing doesn't happen overnight... Hello World != coding a GPU driver you know...

Definitely not. It's a brutally hard thing, requiring roughly the same level of ability as keeping up with the key people in lkml. There is a reason why it's slow. There is a reason why the Linux AMD proprietary driver has been very dodgy in the past.

[Svartalf]

I realy like to contribute code somewhere in/to the driver stack. I realy dislike doing so in non-gpl but then again this is not a solo show and thus arguing about the more liberal license is just... totaly stupid/futile/egocentric/etcetera.

Heh... You'll note there was this 3D stack for Linux that precedes the current DRM framework, called Utah-GLX. It was licensed under the MIT/X11 license. I was one of their contributors/maintainers for a long while.

Did I mention I prefer LGPL and usually release stuff under it and the GPL?

Your reasoning is why I did what I did and would do it again, in light of things.

[yotambien]

It's hard to tell whether relicensing the graphics stack to GPL would attract more developers.[...]

On the other hand, the more liberal license of the graphics stack has not yielded in any significant contributions from the BSD camp.[...]

It's not about developers, but about users (that's you). There's a reason why the licenses are either MIT or LGPL. Programs (thus users) have to use those libraries, regardless of what license those programs are written on. Or else you won't play much Q3 with the OSS drivers.

[pingufunkybeat]

Well, the GPU drivers are obviously suffering from the lack of community contributions. Of course, there is significant work being done by a number of community developers, but I don't think that it's realistic to expect the GPU drivers to be written 95% by the community, like many large FLOSS projects are.

I think that Gallium3d is a step in the right direction. It centralises lots of the technology, so it is much more reusable. It should make writing drivers easier. But I'm guessing that we'll still be dependent on the manufacturers for much of the basic infrastructure work for new GPUs.

The reason why open drivers lack behind the closed ones is that writing GPU drivers is not easy, and takes lots of manpower.

[V!NCENT]

The switch from wanting to contributing doesn't happen overnight... Hello World != coding a GPU driver you know...

[monraaf]

It's hard to tell whether relicensing the graphics stack to GPL would attract more developers. There's always talk from people saying that they want to contribute to the graphics drivers. But saying you want to and actually contributing are two different things.

On the other hand, the more liberal license of the graphics stack has not yielded in any significant contributions from the BSD camp. And they've been leeching on Linux code for quite some time now.

Personally I would be in favor of relicensing to LGPL. But that's something for the actual contributors to decide.

[V!NCENT]

I realy like to contribute code somewhere in/to the driver stack. I realy dislike doing so in non-gpl but then again this is not a solo show and thus arguing about the more liberal license is just... totaly stupid/futile/egocentric/etcetera.

[mantielero]

I am a user of ATI X1300 (no longer supported by the linux propietary driver anymore). I don't stop updating the kernel because of the GPU. The propietary driver stopped compiling about a year ago. For me the performance difference of r300g versus fglrx is huge: r300g works, fglrx doesn't work.

Thanks for your work guys. I'd love to help, but not being a developper is a big stopper.

[pingufunkybeat]

It's a fact that many people refuse to publish code under the BSD license, especially after companies like Microsoft hijacked code and closed it and put it into their expensive solutions.

Svartalf was pointing at that. That's the cause. The rate of development of Linux can be explained at least in part through this documented fact. I guarantee you that SGI would not have released XFS under the BSD license, and that Sun would not have released StarOffice or Java (!!!! lol) under the BSDL.

He doesn't need to suggest that people don't like the BSDL, as a programmer with many years of experience in the Linux/BSD world, he is perfectly aware that there are many people who use the (L)GPL for these reasons.

To be honest, the situation is probably quite different for GPU drivers, which are so specialised and tied to so many other things, that ripping the code (to create a closed driver) would be pretty useless anyway.

[V!NCENT]

stupid, unfunny and wrong to boot. fail.

Whatever...