Re: Resources in X11 port

[Ulf Carlsson <ulfc@bun.falkenberg.se>]

On Tue, Apr 13, 1999 at 08:10:52PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > If you (the porters) are willing to wait until June to have publicly
> > distributable code, you should develop for the 4.0 branch rather than
> > the 3.3 branch.  There are a lot of useful new features in the new
> > code base, and the new design is quite a bit easier to code for than
> > the old.
> 
> Actually I wonder if it will be.

I got an email from the X team today which told me that pulic release date for
a beta snapshot of 4.0 still is set to June.

> Not having seen the code because of the silly XFree about beta releases its
> hard to be sure. The X folks I talked to all pointed me at the 8514 driver -
> which is very similar in many ways to the SGI cards - both are designed for
> X11, both have no direct frame buffer access and they have fairly similar
> concepts.

That 8514 driver is certainly a good driver to look at while writing a driver
for the SGI cards, but it's generally a bad idea to just rip the code off. I
have at least not had much luck doing success hacks.

The 8514 driver is also a quite old driver and it's not using the new interfaces
in for Xserver.

> I would urge btw that anyone working on an XFree SGI driver releases it under
> a license like the NPL so that the XFree people can't hide it in a locked away
> beta release in future.

The copyright still remains to the person who wrote the code, and even if the
code is locked away in a beta release, it's possible for the writer himself to
make his own code public (i think).

- Ulf