VIA Appoints An Open-Source Liaison

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VIA Appoints An Open-Source Liaison

VIA's commitment to the open-source community has been everything but stellar. VIA Technologies has taken advantage of the open-source community before, and many are saying VIA is doing another open-source bluff...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjYxNA

[izual]

What is his name now?
Is it Harald, Herard or Herald?

[Kano]

The VIA website is one of the worst examples how you can confuse a user. Also when you finally manage to find a download don't expect that the thing they call driver acutally works. It working state is even below fglrx.

[izual]

Oh, now there are 2 choices left! Harald or Herard?

[Michael]

Originally Posted by izual

Oh, now there are 2 choices left! Harald or Herard?

Now there's only one choice left.

Note to self: Don't type news stories after a big drunken OSCON Sun-MySQL bash

[yoshi314]

they've made a wise choice - to appoint an external opensource-related person to manage the whole thing. similar to what ati has done.

that'll improve communication. depending on the competence of this person, which i'm not familiar with.

[Ex-Cyber]

I think it all hinges on how much authority he has. That is, will he actually be able to manage any work, or just make recommendations to management?

[ethana2]

How long did it take ATi to completely overhaul their image? 6 months?

I hope to see good things come from this.

[Svartalf]

Originally Posted by phoronix

Phoronix: VIA Appoints An Open-Source Liaison

VIA's commitment to the open-source community has been everything but stellar. VIA Technologies has taken advantage of the open-source community before, and many are saying VIA is doing another open-source bluff...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjYxNA

That'd be my take on things...they're playing another bluff. How many times have they said they're opening up and did diddly (Even within the last 6 months even...)? Now, considering that they've picked whom they picked, it'll be depending on how much actual pull the guy has within VIA's management chain as to what actually happens this time.

[grege]

To VIA a simple message.

If you want to be truely successful in the Netbook and mini-ITX markets building good hardware is not enough. You must have Operating Systems that run well on that hardware and Applications that just don't run, but run well.

The answer is Linux and the solution is open drivers.

Vista is too big for the small form factor machines, XP is dead.

It also needs to be up to date, an Ubuntu or Fedora 9, not the ancient Debian used by Xandros on the EeePC.

Open up the drivers and ALSA and Pulse Audio and XORG will make mini-ITX media boxes that work well and netbooks that just work. No mucking about, no driver downloads, just install and go and update through the distro.

VIA makes a profit, Intel gets some competition, the consumer gets reliable, reasonably priced product.

Everyone wins.