Does Rising Linux Usage Share = Increasing AMD Open Source Driver Development?

[Prescience500]

As I'm sure many other people have noticed, this is an exciting time for Linux. Wayland is rapidly progressing. Open source video drivers are improving at a much quicker pace. Now, apparently Linux usage share among personal desktop computers is increasing. http://netmarketshare.com/operating-...=9&qpcustomb=0

I think I remember Bridgeman once saying that the resources that AMD intends to put into open source drivers will be somewhat proportional to usage share. Does this mean we can expect or at least hope for addditional resources pouring in? Even if not, the extra usage share may bring in new developers, bug testers, software, and market power. Does anyone have any thoughts or hopes?

[Prescience500]

Hmm...well, by early summer, Linux "desktop" market share will be at 2% if this trend continutes and hopefully it will continue after that. Maybe that will help change things.

[bridgman]

Q, you should of course feel free to post your theories and opinions but please don't imply that your information is coming from AMD in general or me in particular, unless it actually is (which is not the case here).

and the result ist: no amd will not grow there open-source driver team because there team are already bigger than there open-source driver market share.

No, my comments in this area were about Catalyst not the open source effort.

On the open source side we are not trying to "write the driver ourselves" and there is no expectation for the team size to scale with market share; the approach is to be *part* of the community and focus on getting information and initial support into developers hands. We also have a couple of developers working on specific areas of functionality which are of interest to Embedded customers (since the Embedded business unit is funding them).

and they also think if the linux market grow they all use the Catalyst they really think no one use the open-source driver )Read: market share is to low(.

Huh ? Number one, no. Number two, what does Catalyst vs radeon have to do with Linux market share ?

its not only windows vs linux its catalyst vs radeon driver.

in fact the radeon driver is payed by the Server CPU (Opteron) customers only because they want OpenCL on GPUs as a co-processor. because of this they work on OpenCL but not on power-managment. And these linux opteron customers don't want closed source catalyst. *

Um... no again. Open source OpenCL work is targetted at embedded customers, not server customers.

#Also the forum show the truth: Bridgman don't think Linux grow on the desktop he think only google chrombook OS and andorid grow and because of this the website statistic show more linux systems. '

Sure, but that was what the previous charts said (the ones you sent me) at the time and you also agreed with that view. These charts are showing a slightly different picture (although some other sites are starting to show the same growth).

I never mentioned ChromeOS, and the links you sent showed desktop linux share relatively static plus about 2% new from Android.

also amd think andorid (2% market share) is a more important market than GNU/Linux (1,5% market share)

??? They require fairly different solutions (look at the multimedia stacks, for example), although in the short term there are development tasks that can benefit both and that's where we are focusing. Don't believe I have ever commented on which was more important, just the extent that the same solution would work for both.

so your news about linux market share grow dosn't matter for AMD!

Again, ??? Maybe in the sense that (as I have said here several times) our current staffing level is based on ~2% share for desktop Linux in anticipation of future growth. Historically the "measured" market share seems to have hovered between 1.0 and 1.25% (it went up during the Vista days then slipped back a bit after Win7 came out), so the fact that it's now getting closer to 1.5% is definitely interesting.

[Prescience500]

my answer to this:
"This is just speculation because its a chicken vs egg problem you don't sell well because you don't invest money and because you don't invest money you don't sell well.
Stupid argumentum ad circulum. (Self-fulfilling prophecy bullshit)
But yes i know every stupid economic school teaching and university lecture teach this bullshit. but in fact its just a "Eristic Dialektic pe nefas" -->
"Evil technique with unauthorized sugical and micromanipulative methods "
This bullshit is know over 1000 of years and you are not the first one trying this crap.
o man i read to much old scool "Arthur Schopenhauer - Eristische Dialektik" http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristische_Dialektik"

In school, I majored in economics and I assure you that this was definately not taught. In fact, we were taught that in the long run, it was a fallacy.

So...I'm guessing from the back and forth that Linux desktop marketshare will need to would rise above 2% for a real difference to be made. If Linux spending is not scaling, then maybe 3-10% before more spending on open source drivers? (Essencially meaning that a relatively high market share might cause a policy change or something.) Call me an optimist, but prehaps a higher market share could mean more independant developers working on the open source drivers, too.

[bridgman]

you don't get bridgmans words the radeon driver team will relatively get less money compared to the catalyst because the catalyst get more money if the market share grow.

if we get ZERO market share on the Desktop+workstation they close the linux catalyst completely then the radeon driver wins the battle.

after that linux can get 100 market share on the desktop just because: windows is better in playing catalyst.

Q, I think it's more correct to say you don't get my words.

The *only* thing I said was that I didn't expect we would be increasing Linux driver development spend as a consequence of the web site indicating growth from ~1% to ~1.5% -- mostly because we had planned ahead and were already funding based on a higher (than 1.5%) share in anticipation of some future growth.

From that you claim to have deduced future spending ratios between Catalyst and open source development effort, the "fact" that the 50% growth in reported market share was driven by the availability of the radeon driver (without any evidence of the radically increased AMD market share which would need to accompany that), our responses to zero and 100% Linux market shares, and a number of other odd things.

Again, please feel free to post your own theories but do *not* present them as my statements or as AMD policy.

[Prescience500]

were do you come from? the US people don't act like they get the same education.

US people do never have a fallacy because they are blessed by God !

we read many stuff about the US educating in Germany : "Police in U.S. schools:
Behave yourself or I'll shoot!" http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/a...812885,00.html

they start a war against 10 year old kids with disabilities and learning disorders and put the poor childs in prison a LIFE TIME!.

really the US people FAIL! "Zero Tolerance" only mean: Zero Brain.

The only reason there are armed police officers in American schools is because of tort lawyers who have schools terrified of lawsuits and overreactive parents who blow potential dangers way out of proportion. I can see armed police in a some of the schools in bad areas making sense, but not not in most of the schools they are in. Also, a lot of the violence in the bad areas would go away if drugs were legalized because the drugs would be sold by businesses and not gangs.

[darkbasic]

[troll mode]
bridgman told me they will double the open source team as a result of the incredible market share increase from 1.0 to 1.5%, 100% sure!
[/troll mode]

[accumulator]

Don't feed the trolls.. or..

Qaridarium thinks linux market share grows proportionally to his trolling

[darkbasic]

OMG we are going to overwhelm every other os on the earth then

[bug77]

Q explaining to two people what they actually said/meant. *grabs popcorn and enjoys the show*