[ltp] Re: ATI Linux driver petition

[Daniel Pittman]

On 27 Aug 2004, Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 08:21:38 -0500, Andrew Gaffney
> <agaffney@skylineaero.com> wrote:
>> Dax Kelson wrote:
>>> FYI, a petition to ATI to treat Linux as a first class OS.
>>>
>>> http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/
>>>
>>> Up a few days, and already 10K signatures.
>>
>> Doesn't ATI already provide full hardware specs to the opensource community
>> 	for
>> all their products? I think this is much better than buggy binary drivers like
>> Nvidia puts out.
>
> to a certain extent yes.  they provide full specs for all the old
> chips and radeons up to through r200 (only the fixed 3d pipeline, not
> the programmable stuff).  r300 is 2d only.  Their developers are also
> very helpful to open source developers.

As far as I understand it, they release the specifications when they
consider that the content will no longer give away a competitive
advantage.

So, the older the chip the better documented it is. If you wait then the
whole r200 core stuff will be available, etc.

Which doesn't help so much today, but is nice of them. 
      Daniel
-- 
The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.
        -- Eric Hoffer