phoronix.com — Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth talks about the new ATI fglrx Linux driver and AMD's new open-source work. He is pleased by AMD moves and leadership. The new fglrx driver will be available as an update in Gutsy Gibbon but will be integrated with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
Sep 6, 2007 View in Crawl 4
tehmothSep 7, 2007
yeah because NDAs are a GREAT help to the open source community, if by open source community you mean the group of developers who agree to them and also agree to not release specifications or make their code a decent reference where there are no specs. WHat a great victory. not.
tehmothSep 7, 2007
it seems mark shuttleworth does:<a class="user" href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/128">http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/128</a>
trogdoorSep 7, 2007
"Basically, you have one guy under the NDA write up a spec, and another guy implements it."That works when the *Code* is under a NDA, in this case the specification is what they agree not to disclose. So how exactly does the agreement not to release information about the specification allow "one guy under the NDA to write up a spec" and release it?
tehmothSep 7, 2007
no, its people like you are the reasons why companies don't bother releasing open specifications so that open source developers can use them to write drivers that don't rely on a small group of developers' NDA-acquired knowledge. We don't want companies to 'bother with open-source development' as they tend to fsck it up (NDAs, stupid homebrewed licenses or the GPL and really crappy buggy code (intel is a good example of this)), we want them to open the specifications of their hardware so drivers can be written properly.
vektuzSep 7, 2007
What the hell is up with that picture of him there? In his pyjamas in a giant indoors jumping castle? Oh, wait, I forgot, he's ridiculously rich. I'd do the same. We all would.
jorgepblankSep 8, 2007
Isn't this amazing? ATI (AMD), which used to be the most bashed cards out there, for supposedly having the worst support and what not, now might possibly have the best support, they went from one extreme to the other. Of course I'm sure this has to do with its acquisition by AMD, but still. Unfortunately, I recently just switched from ATI to Nvidia, I have a nice card, but ironically my drivers don't install correctly on Feisty, I have to install them manually. It seems like no matter what I've always had a bad experience, hopefully, Nvidia will follow up with some of the same actions as AMD has taken.