Re: [RFC] Small PCI core patch

Benjamin Herrenschmidt
2005-11-22T03:47:08Z

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 22:23 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
> On 11/21/05, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> > which is obviously impossible) etc... They really doesn't give a shit
> > about what we think, and will continue to do so until they get a bit fat
> > lawsuit, that is my opinion at least.
>
> In the US you can't sue to force their hardware open until they are a
> proven monopoly. And as long as we have both Nvidia and ATI splitting
> the market we won't get a monopoly.

No but you can sue for GPL breakage if their blob is considered as a
derivative work or that sort of thing.

> So the choices are:
>
> 1) Live in 1998. What happens in five years R200's are no longer
> available, fallback to VGA?
>
> 2) Temporarily accept the ugly drivers. Let desktop development
> continue. Work hard on getting the vendors to see the light and go
> open source.

Won't happen without some incentive. Besides, I can't accept the ugly
driver for the very simple reason that they only exist for x86 and I
have no such thing ...

Your other points are totally irrelevant.

Ben.