Mesa's Rate Of Git Development Is Slowing

[asdx]

S3TC is owned by HTC now. It's hard to know if they'll aggressively pursue users of this patent. HTC doesn't strike me as a particularly evil company, at least not on the scale of Oracle or Microsoft.



It's hard to know if the statistics reflect what's actually happening. For example, just ONE of the commits earlier this year pushed over 100,000 lines of code to get the ball rolling for HD7000 support -- which still isn't complete, but last I checked, you can successfully boot up a HD7000 in KMS mode, and use a 2D-only driver or llvmpipe to get working X.


No.


Yes, very heavily. Much of the grunt work of supporting recent AMD GPUs is thanks to Red Hat. They also help out Intel on their driver, they also work on old GPUs and server GPU chipsets for KMS support, and they also help with the overall architecture. Also, one of their employees, Dave Airlie, is the "chief" for the DRM (direct rendering manager) subsystem of the kernel, which basically means that he is one "rank" removed from Linus Torvalds in terms of decision-making power about what does or does not go into the Linux kernel's open source graphics drivers. Dave's task in that role is to take all the DRM-related patches, review them, and determine whether they are really ready for mainline. That way, ideally, Linus Torvalds never sees graphics code that's totally atrocious and untested and bad.

Oh, wait. Except that he does. Remember the "UNTESTED CRAP" fiasco?



Yes, the "etc" role is quite significant. Don't forget VMware, which is the company that bought up Tungsten Graphics. Tungsten is the company that originally designed the Gallium3d architecture, which is being used by all open source graphics drivers except for Intel's. The one guy who initially started the Mesa project way back in the 90s, Brian Paul, now works for VMware.

A lot of people who are either unaffiliated with a company, or working for some small business, are significant contributors to Mesa and/or the DRM stack. While a "majority" of the work may be done by large enterprises such as Intel, VMware and Red Hat, the individual / small business contributor is a huge part of Mesa.



I'm going to widen your question to include the entire open source graphics stack, which includes Xorg, libdrm, the DRM kernel subsystem, and Mesa.

In the approximate descending order by level of commitment (first one is most committed/best contributor IMHO): Red Hat, VMware, Intel, AMD, a few dedicated people who are unemployed or whose day job is unrelated to graphics drivers, Google, PathScale, Oracle, Apple, IBM, and a "long tail" of people from various companies and individuals who have between 1 and 10 commits (in other words, not a whole lot).

If S3TC is owned by HTC, can't Red Hat, Intel, VMware or AMD approach HTC then? or even start a lawsuit against them if they won't cooperate?

Have something like this already happened?

[asdx]

Red Hat, Intel, VMware and AMD should sue the hell out of HTC over that fucking ST3C patent.

[Xake]

Red Hat, Intel, VMware and AMD should sue the hell out of HTC over that fucking ST3C patent.

Hmmm, no.

But seeing as HTC likes to make android-devices maybe they should approach them asking if they can have a no-suing-over-this/these-patents-aggreement for the good of the Linux ecosystem. I think it would be a win for HTC too.

[DanL]

Red Hat, Intel, VMware and AMD should sue the hell out of HTC over that fucking ST3C patent.

On what grounds? It's easier just to build your own mesa (not that I enable S3TC in my builds because I live in America and that would be illegal...).

[uid313]

On what grounds? It's easier just to build your own mesa (not that I enable S3TC in my builds because I live in America and that would be illegal...).

So just because it might illegal, you don't do it?
In some countries it is illegal to be gay, in some countries it is illegal for women to drive, some countries saying certain things is illegal.

Just because something is illegal, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Do what you feel is right as long as it does not harm anyone.

[archibald]

(not that I enable S3TC in my builds because I live in America and that would be illegal...)

So just because it might illegal, you don't do it?

An ellipsis in such statements is the textual equivalent of whistling and looking at the ceiling.

However, I'm sure that's not the case here... :-)

[DanL]

An ellipsis in such statements is the textual equivalent of whistling and looking at the ceiling. However, I'm sure that's not the case here... :-)

Exactly

[89c51]

And because some (or many) laws are stupid it means that you have to surrender yourself to stupidity

[asdx]

Fuck software patents. Why don't you guys living in the US vote against that fucking shit? Don't you folks have a say with things like that?

The whole world has to suffer because of the idiotic laws in USA.

[uid313]

Fuck software patents. Why don't you guys living in the US vote against that fucking shit? Don't you folks have a say with things like that?

The whole world has to suffer because of the idiotic laws in USA.

How many Americans do you think have ever heard of "software patents" ?