On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 12:36:41AM +0100, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
My guess is that reverse engineering the drivers is just too hard, apparently the Linux driver is based on the Windows NT driver (as in very heavily, i did read somewhere that it even emulates parts of the Windows registry!) and I figure that people who care about the driver being free have bought an older ATI card and those that don't care just use the Nvidia driver. I could imagine that reverse engineering a driver/card to produce a driver worse than one that is already available isn't a very attractive option for most people.
Yup - swat I did, I go me an ATI Radeon 9200 (and very pleased with it I am too) for my home machine... And am just not using 3d on the Nvidea card that I got for my work machine (might get round to it one day, if I decide that it's worth having non-free, binary nastiness, drivers in my kernel).
What would be *really* nice is if someone designed some open hardware for talking GL over AGP... and then someone wrote so nice GPL drivers for it... But I think that'd involve too much outlay in the first case, and that it's probably not of the highest importance to the people in the know.
Right - back to work.