Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[James Hubbard]

2008/5/22 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at hi.is>:
> I have also never understood why hardware manufactures dont release specs to
> the open source
> community or atleast provide a proper functional driver even if it's an
> closed one.
>
> One would think it was in their best interest to sell as much of the
> hardware they manufacture regardless of
> which OS the end user is using.

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the reason that they don't
want to hand out specs is due to the fact all of their hardware is
very similar and they don't want to cannibalize sales of their high
end cards.
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=539

The only reason that I've been using their binary driver lately is for
the suspend and dual monitor support.  In Feb., they finally released
a driver that would allow suspend and resume to work while my dell
laptop is docked.  This is after years of it not working.  I've
upgraded my two home machines to F9 and they seems to be working fine
with the nv driver other than suspend.  I'm not upgrading my work
laptop until the binary driver comes out.

For past few years, I've been a supporter of Nvidia.  They had always
provided the best binary drivers and eventually gotten around to
supporting the newer video cards.  I've even written a spec where Dell
changed the video chips so that the better Nvidia card would be in the
laptop.  (This was a large order and 3D capabilities were important.)
This was in spite of the fact, as others have pointed out, that they
are always late releasing a driver for a new distro when X has
changed.

Since, ATI/AMD have changed to providing hardware specs, I'm going to
be buying their stuff from now on.  There's a bunch of stuff that
Nvidia's driver doesn't support and who knows if it will ever get
supported under Linux, i.e. hdmi audio, better power mgmt, etc.  At
least with the AMD, I know that there's some hope that at some point
features will be added.

Thank you Fedora for not being held hostage to Nvidia.  Sorry this has
turned into a bit of a rant.

James Hubbard