The Significant Corporate Importance & Pressure Around Mesa Open-Source Linux 3D Drivers

[sophisticles]

Marek gets it. Scaling open source is extremely hard. The best result is that these corporations pay people real livable wages to contribute to important open source projects full time.

That's not what open source is about, open source back in the early 70's was about teaching college students how operating systems, specifically Unix and in the 80's Sun was one of the major proponents of open source because it allowed them to trick programmers into contributing code for free.

Even to this day, look at what open source leads to, projects like Mint have to rely on donations that used to bring in 20 grand a month and are now at 10 grand a month, and KDE, who up until a few years ago was barely pulling in 100k a year.

In fact, go find the comments that Scott McNealy, Sun co-founder and CEO, made about how he feels self taught is better than formal education.

Want to know why he feels that way? Because it takes about 5 years to get a bachelors degree in computer science from a good state college and it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and a person like that isn't going to sit and write code for free.

But a person that is self taught and writes code in their spare time is less likely to value their work and more likely to believe is a stupid ideology like the GPL.

There's nothing wrong with any open source project that can't be fixed by making it closed source, hiring professional programmers and selling the results to consumers.

[gentoofu]

GL Thread whitelist, Proton, and wine are distasteful and should be rid off as well. Keep reporting them "bugs" until the end of time! The open-source community will not bend and stand down!!

[boxie]

What are the competitors to Mesa in the Linux or FOSS world?

proprietary drivers

[bachchain]

You would need to patch Viewperf on all machines where it's installed right now.

Can't be that hard. After all, those same machines are apparently running Mesa dev builds.

[rmfx]

What would improve mesa’s image also is to cleanup/better organize the repo.

[omer666]

We may think whatever we want about open source ideology and software development, but this proves that Linux now has actual business on the desktop

[ssokolow]

That's why Windows, macOS and ChromeOS make up almost 100% of the end-user desktop and notebook computing share.

Microsoft gets it. Apple gets it. And as horrible as they are, Google also gets it.

Apple doesn't get it. They've always had a history of dropping compatibility as quickly as they believe they can get away with.

1. Apple's "contact your vendor for an update" policy goes right back to when System 7 and support for running 32-bit-clean broke various applications and they just assumed that nobody running hardware too new to dual-boot to System 6 would want those apps.
2. There are plenty of early Mac OS apps where the only reason I can find that they don't run on my Power Mac G4 with Mac OS 9 is that Mac OS 9 provides no support, whether real or emulated, for 1-bit graphics modes. (In some cases, because enthusiasts managed to patch them and their "Please change your display into 1-bit mode" startup check was the only thing blocking them.)
3. They didn't support Classic Environment on Intel macs running Rosetta. That's only about five years since the last Mac OS 9. Given that Mac OS X didn't really become stable enough to be a proper replacement for Mac OS 9 until 10.2 and things like my Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 2002 shipped with 10.1 and 9.2.2 for bare-metal dual-booting, that's also only three Mac OS X versions in practical terms.
4. Rosetta was introduced in the "restore disc only" Intel builds of Mac OS 10.4 and dropped in Mac OS 10.7. That was about six or seven years and only three Mac OS X releases, one of which switched mid-lifecycle.
5. I don't feel like looking up the exact years, but Apple was quite eager to drop support for 32-bit binaries.
6. One of the guys I chat with is feeling a bit of buyer's remorse over his decision to upgrade to an Apple Silicon iMac when Microsoft EOLed Windows 7 because Apple restricted access to the hypervisor API that VirtualBox required to virtualize Windows 7 at anything approaching usable.
7. Apple just released macOS 14.4 and it broke the JVM on Apple Silicon by turning SIGBUS and SIGSEGV conditions the JVM expects to catch (essentially the userland equivalent of how the kernel catches SIGSEGV as part of detecting when to page back in data that was swapped out) into uncatchable SIGKILL, in direct violation of what POSIX specifies, and they apparently just treated it like any other minor update, not running it through a preview channel first.
8. They've always had a policy of making macs that'll never boot any OS version older than what was current when they were finalized... even if that meant requiring a special bundled version. (eg. the hand-me-down mid-2010 iMac I was given about a month ago came with Mac OS 10.6.3, but it won't boot the 10.6.3 retail disc... if you want to run Rosetta, you need to source the ever-so-slightly newer version of 10.6.3 on the restore disc that none of the abandonware sites have archived yet.)
   
   This is particularly significant when you realize how many applications lost support when they dropped support for System 6 without any sort of compatibility environment and, given how ridiculously buggy he's found macOS 14 (eg. spontaneously losing connection to apple-made bluetooth input devices, making VNC implementations unreliable, etc.), also the other big reason said chat buddy is feeling buyer's remorse, since he can't downgrade to macOS 13.

[user556]

... Apple at least is able to create a cult like atmosphere and people would choose it for those reasons.

Windoze fans are far more cult like than the Mac. And always have been. They just don't recognise it with heads buried in the sand is all.

[varikonniemi]

Ask Linus how compatibility should be handled.

[mdedetrich]

They make up almost 100% because legacy. They're on top because they're on top and being on top they stay on top using shady practices. Microsoft is even building adware right into Windows itself because they've learned from Google that people will put up with data theft.

This is conspiracy style thinking and you should look at yourself as such.

While its true that shady business practices are a factor, its only one of many and it also doesn't explain why Linux dominates in other areas (i.e. servers) where companies using Linux have also arguably used shady business practices (google/redhat anyone). Business is business, regardless of whether we are dealing Linux or other OS's.

The core issue here, which other people have mentioned in this thread is that historically Linux has placed less import on not breaking users (usually this is more of a userspace issue then the Linux kernel issue, Linus is famously particular about this) but for users the distinction is not relevant here.

Ontop of this you also have fundamental decision decisions in Linux which other OS's such as Windows/Mac don't have which objectively makes it harder for users especially for desktop which is the **one** area where Linux has pathetic traction, i.e. Linux being a monolithic kernel which means that it doesn't have stable ABI's for things like graphics card drivers which matters when you know, you buy a new graphics card and you need the latest driver but for obvious reasons you don't want to be forced to use the latest version of Linux kernel (which tend to less tested than older more stable versions).

This problem is less of an issue in closed down systems where the vendor has almost complete control over the hardware (i.e. steam deck, android phones) but you can't avoid this problem with laptop's/desktops where the hardware configuration can be anything.