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

[ssokolow]

In all fairness, it's ridiculous to expect any company to support an OS version that is older than what that specific model is designed to run with.

Imagine Dell selling a new laptop that was designed with Win 11 in ming and being forced to support installing Vista or XP on it.

I can understand from the standpoint of wanting to head off all the support calls such a thing would result in for them to make it so installing an OS older than what was shipped is impossible,

...and yet the standard approach in the Windows world is to support back to the first retail disc for the major OS version that they're targeting, so long as you're OK with grabbing the relevant drivers from the manufacturer's website and installing them using the built-in VESA-mode (or VGA, in earlier Windowses) video drivers.

I don't see why Apple couldn't easily do that. It'd have made it a helluva lot easier (if possibly less profitable) to reinstall a system to as-delivered condition after losing your restore media in the days before Internet Restore.

[Sonadow]

Generally: Yes. And Mesa compatibility and performance matter for all of us. Whether developer (paying bills) or user (using software).

This kind of code is also hard to maintain (old GNU code with thousands of special paths for that UNIX, BSD, Nextstep...). Backwards compatibility is required, as soon as it becomes bug compatibility and workarounds for other software (elsewhere) it becomes a burden. And doing the Apple thing (e.g. just dropping compatibility) isn't a thing.
.

It is their damn responsibility to maintain it.

Microsoft has been doing this with Windows for three decades and counting. This is the reason a good amount of x64 software and drivers from the Windows 7 period can still run on Windows 11.

[mrg666]

I can tell you do not know what my background is and I am not going to list my resume here because i don't want people think that I am bragging or as one person claimed that i was a narcissist.

I will tell you that I am a certified Unix Sys Admin from a major university and I have 2 college degrees on top of that.

I have been running a Windows/Linux dual boot for decades, going back to Win 2k/Red Hat on a 900mhz Athlon.

I have heard variations of what you have stated for decades and they all fail to explain how the revenue is generated is the software is given away for free.

Linus and the Linux Foundation are an outlier because they get their money from the corporate sponsors, like Intel and Microsoft, who makes billions selling proprietary products.

But assume you just graduated college, have a degree in comp sci, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and you decide to work on a project where the source code is being given away for free.

Where exactly do you think the money is going to come from?

The KDE project is not rolling in dough.

The XFCE project is not rolling in dough.

In fact, most projects are not able to generate any revenue other than from donations, or a nicer way of saying it, sponsorships.

Show any economic theory, any business theory, or even basic math principle, where you can give a product away for free and still generate revenue.

Look at websites, how do they generate revenue? Subscriptions or ads or both, without that they don't make money by giving away their content for free.

If a book author gives his book away for free how does he make money from it?

I'm going to assume you don't work for free and I assume your employers isn't giving away their services for free, so why should programmers work for free?

https://youtu.be/KfZiMqEUKFA

[blackiwid]

Sometimes you have to deal with this kind of cr*p from closed source apps.

Isn't that the primary reason why we have Containers that proprietary Software can bundle their hardcoded dependencies and run independent from the rest of the system.

So basically because nobody is willing to create a docker or flatpack for this software we must make all Linux Distributions basically a SPECViewPerf Container System.

[blackiwid]

Then you have the subset of Linux users that demand everything be GPL, for who this is a religion, just like any other formal religion, with a blind adherence to ideology.

And then there are People that operate in reality but still seak perfection, as in seperating a proprietary OS but even without ideology Windows is such a peace of garbage that I try to do everything in linux and since gaming works so well it comes down to VR at the moment why I seldom boot windows still.

But the point is, I demand all non-gaming stuff to be foss, and I still think at least for many gaming companies Opensource lisence could work for them to be ahead of the competitors, they still keep the copyright on their artwork. But I am ok on a seperate machine to have proprietary Games.

But on a nongaming PC besides Bios and even that I hate, I only want foss, why should a basic tool be not in my own control, I don't want a proprietary hammer, or screwdriver, that is monopolized by the owner and can have features like spying or not working anymore if some online service gets shut down or similar stuff, if I don't accept that for a tool like a hammer why would I accept that for a basic software tool like a OS / Server or Texteditor etc...

[hsci]

It is their damn responsibility to maintain it.

Microsoft has been doing this with Windows for three decades and counting. This is the reason a good amount of x64 software and drivers from the Windows 7 period can still run on Windows 11.

Their are also volunteer developers. Actually most start as volunteers. I would not use that harsh words.

Regarding compatibility:
Intel Sandy Bridge (HD3000) from 2011

• Windows Open GL 3.1
• MacOS OpenGl 3.2
• Linux? Well. It uses the actual hardware capabilities OpenGL 3.3

Still runs venerable Quake3 and even (slowly) CSGO. Only one of them invested in long term maintenance and provided significant updates up until today.

Microsoft keeps old API/ABIs forever in usable condition. Apple drops stuff faster than we can say "deprecation" (remember PPC? ARM32?). We should account that drivers are implemented by others in case of Windows. And that some of them never provide updates, for example people suffering from Win11 which need to use age old Win7 drivers and only achieve OpenGL 3.1.

[anda_skoa]

I have heard variations of what you have stated for decades and they all fail to explain how the revenue is generated is the software is given away for free.

As I tried to explain, but apparently have not done in a way you would understand, the word "free" has different meanings in different context.

It is unfortunate that it can mean "without cost" and also "without restriction" or even the combination of both.

Software "given away for free" is not necessarily free in the sense of "no restrictions". In a lot of cases it is not.
Vice versa, Free Software is not necessarily free as in "no cost".

This is partially what the Open Source label was trying to help with when people have difficulties with the concept of free as applied to restrictions.

I get this is hard to understand as the "no cost" meaning is so prevalent, but given your stated education you should be able to if you give it a bit of thought.

[qarium]

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.

you wicket sophisticles again i have some bad news for you:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/magnet-goblin-hackers-use-1-day-flaws-to-drop-custom-linux-malware/amp/

this "Magnet Goblin" Hacker group where the one who did hack me with your help by linking malicious links in the phoronix.com forum.

"CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887, CVE-2024-21888, CVE-2024-21893., Apache ActiveMQ"
these CVEs where used to hack a web server who then was used to hack me.

i am pretty sure at one day you will get a No-knock warrant police raid in the middle of the night..

[sophisticles]

And then there are People that operate in reality but still seak perfection, as in seperating a proprietary OS but even without ideology Windows is such a peace of garbage that I try to do everything in linux and since gaming works so well it comes down to VR at the moment why I seldom boot windows still.

But the point is, I demand all non-gaming stuff to be foss, and I still think at least for many gaming companies Opensource lisence could work for them to be ahead of the competitors, they still keep the copyright on their artwork. But I am ok on a seperate machine to have proprietary Games.

But on a nongaming PC besides Bios and even that I hate, I only want foss, why should a basic tool be not in my own control, I don't want a proprietary hammer, or screwdriver, that is monopolized by the owner and can have features like spying or not working anymore if some online service gets shut down or similar stuff, if I don't accept that for a tool like a hammer why would I accept that for a basic software tool like a OS / Server or Texteditor etc...

Let's assume that the BIOS on your system was open source, what good would that do you? What would you be able to do then that you can't do now?

Also, you want games to be open source and you think that this is somehow a good business model for a gaming company?

How exactly does this work in your mind? EA Sports spent 100 million dollars developing one of they football games, you want them to open source that?

i can understand not everyone having a business background but what astonishes me is that most Linux advocates don't seem to have even basic reasoning skills.

They advocate for things that i doubt they themselves would ever do.

[sophisticles]

zilch

As I tried to explain, but apparently have not done in a way you would understand, the word "free" has different meanings in different context.

It is unfortunate that it can mean "without cost" and also "without restriction" or even the combination of both.

Software "given away for free" is not necessarily free in the sense of "no restrictions". In a lot of cases it is not.
Vice versa, Free Software is not necessarily free as in "no cost".

This is partially what the Open Source label was trying to help with when people have difficulties with the concept of free as applied to restrictions.

I get this is hard to understand as the "no cost" meaning is so prevalent, but given your stated education you should be able to if you give it a bit of thought.

I get the semantics, what you fail to understand is that in the context of software, due to it's very nature, free "without restriction" is for all intents and purposes the same as "without cost".

Assume you went to school, earned a comp sci degree and while in school you had an idea for something that could revolutionize the way we use computers.

You decide that you will release it as GPL code, guess what you just did. You can't monetize it now, because there is no reason for anyone to buy a software license from you when I can just download the code and build the app myself.

In the context of open source "without restriction" is the same as "without cost".

Consider any GPL project, assume Gnome decided that from now on they would only license their software using a per seat model at $100 a pop, how much money do you think they would make?

Zero, zip, zilch, nada?

How long before someone had compiled it from source and had a website distributing binaries?

You can not make money with "free".

It's a nonsensical belief.