alanc @ sun.com

Alan Coopersmith’s blog

Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...
(and though it should be obvious, while Sun pays me to think about things, they disclaim any responsibility for these thoughts, nor do I claim what I say matches in any way what Sun thinks)

Loading...
« OGB Elections: Prope... | Main | OGB Elections: Contr... »
http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20070320 Tuesday March 20, 2007

How to get better ATI drivers for Xorg

Just a quick note... Michael Larabel's post on “How To Get Better ATI Linux Support” is spot on with what we've heard from ATI and from others about ATI in various conversations — if you really want to get their attention, go through their OEM's and resellers, whether that be asking for improvements to their closed source drivers or ports of them to other OS'es, or even opening more specs/sources to the open source community.

(As for the competition, the same goes for them, and Sun is an nVidia reseller, so if there's something missing from their drivers that would encourage you to buy more Sun workstations with nVidia cards, let us know, and we can work it through our channels.)

[Technorati Tags: , , , , ]

Posted at 11:14PM Mar 20, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in X11  |  Comments[3]

Comments:

So ati plan is to make open source drivers some one else problem then?

Posted by kangcool on March 21, 2007 at 02:21 AM PDT #

Surely the whole point here is that the effort will come when the driver quality is a material sales driver. Which means that the market volume will be materially affected, which in turn needs a market that is big enough that a few percent in share means enough extra units to make the effort worthwhile. Sun is in fact in the best position here - because the workstation sales are presumably nearly all UNIX based, and Sun can say to nVidia and ATI 'We'll put cards in our workstations based on quality of Solaris support'. And/or Linux support if users who buy those boxes care. Assuming that the workstation sales are enough (or have enough cache and prestige) to matter. A strategic partnership with either ATI or nVidia will bust that though.

Posted by James Mansion on March 21, 2007 at 03:37 AM PDT #

kangcool: I can't speak to ATI's plans about open source drivers - I'm not privy to them - my point is simply about how you can best influence in their plans. If a big laptop maker or OEM tells ATI that they need an open source driver to sell a million more systems with Radeon chips in, then you can bet ATI will consider open source drivers their problem to solve.

Posted by Alan Coopersmith on March 21, 2007 at 09:36 AM PDT #

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.