Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

Bill Crawford billcrawford1970 at gmail.com
Wed May 21 13:41:59 UTC 2008


2008/5/21 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>:

> There are such things as non disclosure agreements that can prevent
> publishing information. Why shouldn't you respect their legal obligations?

We're not saying they shouldn't. I am tempted to suggest they
shouldn't enter into those in the first place, that would be a large
can of worms though and we don't want to open another one of those
while we still have a large number of nematodes wriggling away in this
thread.

> The binaries permit redistribution.  How does that make it impossible to
> have in a repository?

Again, that's not the issue; the problem is that even when they *are*
in a repository, they don't work with the current X.org. I see at
least two popular third party repositories that do carry both the
nVidia and the ATI proprietary drivers; why are there so few
complaints from the ATI users about this state of affairs?

> This seems to be speculation, seeing as how we don't have a release and the
> xorg drivers were done before they told anyone else the interface was
> stable.

OK, so F9 is now not a release?

> It may be legal commitments - but its their right either way and not really
> anyone else's business.

Yet everyone thinks it's their business to badmouth the Fedora project
because they haven't allowed NVidia's legal commitments to change the
Fedora project's aims and processes?

> Open source is probably a tiny part of their business.  The stuff seems OK
> on a Mac and I haven't seen this kind of complaint about Solaris which uses
> essentially the same driver.  But perhaps they do a better job of
> coordinating their releases so all the needed components are ready before
> users have to deal with it.

They'll have exactly the same problems if and when Solaris upgrades
their X server. The Fedora project doesn't sell hardware and thus has
less obligation (moral or otherwise) to provide for binary drivers for
their OS.




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list