Re: [Dri-devel] Re: ATI Mach64 update

[Frank E. <fe...@ai...>]

On Wednesday 22 August 2001 10:43, David Johnson wrote:

> Hi everyone, 

Hi, David!

> Let me toss in my 2 cents. ATI has always released 2D specs to
> the XFree86 developers. 

Yes, and it's been very definitely _welcome_ as I've used ATI adapters with a 
lot of my Linux boxes for that very reason.

> A couple years ago they decided to release 3D specs
> for the Rage 128 as well as Rage Pro (mach64). The specs were released to
> XFree86 as well as many Linux developers, many of whom are still involved
> in DRI today. Of all the developers the specs were released to only John
> Carmack and Gareth Hughes did any substantial amount of work. 

It was because of a lack of free time, I think.  You gave everyone in the 
Utah-GLX list access, myself included.  My free time comes and goes- I've 
other things I must attend to, my family first and foremost.  I suspect that 
this was the case with all the others that were truely interested.  I would 
like to note that while Gareth and John got it working, there was (and to 
some small extent, still is) issues with the stability of the accel support.  
I fixed quite a few of those issues, while working with Loki Games on several 
of their beta tests of games.  I'll bet good money that ATI didn't know about 
that for whatever reason.

> They did a great job and ATI was very grateful for the amount of work they 
> put into it and the quality of the resulting driver. Of the rest of the 
> people who were given the documentation (and not paid to do development) 
> very few made any contributions to the development of 3D ATI drivers. In 
> that sense, the releasing of specs was a mixed success. 

Problem with open source is that it's not a company, like ATI and the others 
are used to dealing with.  It's a loose collective of talented and skilled 
developers fixing what they see as problems.  Since I don't get paid by 
anyone to work on supporting any of ATI's chips right now (Anyone know of a 
set-top or seriously thin client PC using any of them?  That way I might get 
paid...  :-) so I can't devote continuous time- it's in spurts when I can 
make the time.  From what I can tell, the same goes for everyone else in the 
list that's been tinkering with the code for this- Gareth included.

> It has been a year since I worked for ATI and I am not sure exactly what
> their view of Linux is right now but I do ask you all remember that this is
> a two way street. If you are successful in getting ATI to give you specs
> you must be willing to put the effort in to get something done. The more
> often you ask for specs and then not develop a driver the less likely they
> will give out documentation in the future. When asking for specs be
> completely honest in what you expect to be able to do with them. Havng 15
> people who say they want to do some development is one thing. Having a
> project leader who can organize a group of developers, act as a point of
> contact, and who knows the existing code and what has to be done to get it
> working is another. The bottom line is that releasing documentation to an
> organized group of developers with some sort of a plan is far more
> interesting to ATI than releasing documentation to a bunch of individual
> 'hackers' and hoping for the best. Like it or not this is reality. 

Ok, I see that as a reason for the "silent" treatment we've been getting.  
This translates into Gareth, Manuel, or myself taking up the role of project 
manager for the RagePRO efforts to start with- right?


-- 
Frank Earl