Re: [RFC] Small PCI core patch

Denis Vlasenko
2005-11-22T08:08:12Z

On Tuesday 22 November 2005 06:11, Neil Brown wrote:
> I doubt they will see 'the light' for many years without dollar signs
> attached.
>
> A question worth asking is: Who needs whom? Do we (FLOSS community)
> need them (Graphics hardware manufactures) or do they need us?
> Despite growth in Linux on Desktops, I think we need them a lot more
> than they need us.
[snip]
> Who is going to pay these people to do this work? If you agree with
> the analysis of 'who needs whom', the logical answer is 'us'.
>
> Maybe we need a small consortium of companies with vested interest in
> OSS each ponying up half a million, and use this to employ two teams
> of graphics experts, one of which works within NVidia, and one within
> ATI. I suspect the two companies could be convinced to take on some
> free engineering support, if it was presented the right way.
>
> Anyone got a few dollars to spare?

Historically hackers were not too good at raising funds.

Maybe we should use stuff which we are good at? Forcedeth
is a nice precedent. 2d and especially 3d engines
may be significantly harder to reverse engineer,
but people can scale rather nicely, as kernel development shows. ;)

Then write specs from gained knowledge and put it on a web page.

IIRC reverese engineering for driver development is legal
in most countries.

If ATI/NVidia will sue Linux on this, then server-oriented companies
(RedHat, IBM, ...) probably could provide defence.
--
vda