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Trident Micro Changes Policy Toward XFree86

Posted by HeUnique on from the and-they-indirectly-supported-linux-since-'94 dept.

Alex writes: "According to Egbert on the Xpert Xfree86 mailing list, Trident Microsystems, who makes video chipsets for low end PC's and notebooks, has changed its policy towards open source developers. Get the details here." If you want to email Trident Micro Public Relations, please be polite! Flaming will only hurt the chances that Trident will reverse this decision.

4 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Trident is still making chipsets? by A+Commentor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Man, the last trident video card I saw was PCI... With all the major brands going under, I wouldn't have expected Trident to last.

    What do they expect to get from keeping their specs private?? It's not like they are the leading chipset maker, and other companies are attempting to steal some secrets.

    --

    Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com

  2. Slashdot and flames by VP · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Looks like some of the replies on the mailing list are also worried about the response Trident may get from Slashdot....

  3. Please enlighten me by novastyli · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I have been wondering the same. I really would like to hear an opinion from someone who has been in iteraction with these hardware vendors.

    My hypotheses are:
    • the internal communication is not going well in such a company and the people who decide these things are completely clueless.
    • people making drivers in such a company are trying to make their work look more important.


  4. Good question. by jcr · · Score: 3, Interesting


    I just sent them this:

    Dear Sirs:

    How can it possibly benefit your company to require an NDA for the documentation on how to use your graphics chipsets?

    Several years ago, when I was consulting for Hewlett-Packard, I was informed that HP considered the data on instruction latencies in the PA/RISC architecture to be highly proprietary, and access to it was strictly controlled by their in-house compiler development group. Indeed, even other parts of H-P were unable to get it.

    The upshot was that GCC was unable to include a decent optimizer for PA/RISC, and consequently designers chose PPC, SPARC, MIPS, and the products of other, more cooperative vendors for their designs. Heard anything about PA/RISC lately?

    Frankly, I'm as astounded by your stupidity as I was at theirs.

    -jcr

    "These kids today don't know the simple joy of saving four bytes of page-0 memory on a 6502" - unknown

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."