VIA closes driver source.

[sobkas]

After long disease "open source" driver from VIA is dead. Meanwhile VIA "forgotten" to announce release of closed source one. How pathetic.
Long unlife binary-only zombie-driver.

More on:
http://libv.livejournal.com/11205.html

Closed Source Driver:
http://www.viaarena.com/Driver/p4m90...060808.run.tgz

[Michael]

Thanks for pointing it out, quite interesting...

[colo]

Does not really matter, but it's nevertheless moronic.

[1c3d0g]

Lame. I guess they felt they couldn't compete with Intel's initiative. Now all that stupid company has to do is go bankrupt and save this world from their horrible, unstable hardware and drivers. Via sucks!

[BoomStYx]

This sucks, hopefully we'll eventually know why they backed out, but it probably won't really be a good reason. I actually use a via chipset for my AMD 64, but I don't use their unichrome intergrated graphics. It works quite well in linux, at least for me, never had a problem with it. But this is indeed bad news. Its very unfortunate that companies can never give open source a real chance. I think alot of them like Intel and VIA would find alot of success in such a thing, but not really for nVidia and ATi since they are competitors. Thats like Apple giving everything to Microsoft unintentionally knowing their true intentions back in the 1980's. Disaster hehe.

[niniendowarrior]

Well, I'm still interested in how Unichrome integrated graphics Linux drivers work in terms of performance.

Closing the source does limit the avenues of improvements. Here's to hoping that Via has actually found a great team of developers that can ramp up the performance numbers of the driver.

[Svartalf]

Originally Posted by niniendowarrior

Well, I'm still interested in how Unichrome integrated graphics Linux drivers work in terms of performance.

Closing the source does limit the avenues of improvements. Here's to hoping that Via has actually found a great team of developers that can ramp up the performance numbers of the driver.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of players out there that can do the OpenGL driver in the first place- and most of them are Windows developers. The one thing I can assure you is that trying to wedge a Windows answer into a system to fix a Linux problem just won't work; and will produce lackluster results.

Someone in one of the players in that space told me point-blank "Show me the money" just the other day- they're all worried about IP leakage and blowing patentability, along with they just don't see any good reason for doing Linux development because they only see Microsoft's story on the numbers.

[sobkas]

Unichrome.sf.net developer points in his blog
http://libv.livejournal.com/12239.html
to the discussion on viaarena that indicates future release of source code for upcoming 71 version of IGP driver(it should include code for 70v).
http://forums.viaarena.com/messagevi...threadid=74820

Full message from Via employee:

VIA’s position on supporting open source has not changed for years. VIA maintain and support both UniChrome and Chrome9 HC IGP display drivers. Each Linux driver branch binary package supports specific chips and distributions. The trunk source code that we release covers these branch binary packages all together. For example, the Linux driver source code v71 package will cover the v70 driver binary code. The v71 driver source code will be released on 11/17.

Well I have some doubts about that. First of all Via have history of strange licensing habits. Second why only action against them make release of source code possible (release date 11/17 so for now it's hard to tell if it's true and if they release full source code). And many more.