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Weather Channel Sponsors OSS ATI Radeon Drivers
jvmatthe writes "Jens Owen of Tungsten Graphics (mostly former VA Linux/Precision Insight employees) posted to the DRI developer's mailing list with some excellent news about the future of DRI drivers for the ATi Radeon 8500 video card: "The Weather Channel is funding TG to develop an open source 3D DRI driver for the ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. The driver will be released to the XFree86 Project around Q4 of 2002, to be distributed to the public in future versions of the XFree86 X Server."
Presumably this means that this Weather Channel is the one footing the bill for the development. Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card, the delivery of an open driver is excellent news. This is also listed at the bottom of the TG project page."
This is great news and I really hope this will be the start for more open source drivers. The graphics acceleraters marked moves very fast, what was fast 1 year ago won't run the latest games today. We need drivers before the card is released or when it's released like they have in windows (the latest radeon drivers has support for rv300). Not something like 1 year after it's released.
The same way advertising does.
I think this may be a rather inventive way of advertising. Sponsorship. It has "worked" for decades in sports, why not in open source?
What would be cute is if they had a "Brought to you by..." message during the splash screen for the driver.
Like any other company, they probably weighed the cost of replacing their 5000 SGI boxes with something else. Found that this video card produced a very good benefit at low cost (especially compared to the SGI) but had poor support.
Think about them now buying 5000 cheap AMD rackmounts to put in cabletv headends around the country. Shareholders are saving a fortune - I bet they save a mint compared to the cost of taking the proprietary route.
The fact that they're willing to release the fruits of their labour is just an added plus. They 'get it'.
On a related microsoft-bashing note - imagine deploying 5000 lights-out, 'rock solid' NT boxes around the country in cable-tv headends all over the country. This is actually a great case study in the reliability and manageability requirements that these guys have and how linux beat out nt and other unix-like environments.
Oh, sorry, I mean GNU/Linux haha
>Why not use existing drivers for other video cards instead? (like NVIDIA)
Because the broadcast studio will expect this hardware to be in use for at least half a decade. They aren't like PC users -- I wouldn't expect them to be throwing out their hardware every couple of years.
So, what happens when NVidia does a 3dfx? It took less than that amount of time for 3dfx to go from hero to zero, so it certainly can happen again.
You guessed it, they have to buy all new hardware from a vendor that is intelligent enough to provide open source drivers if they expect to ever update X, had they gone with NVidia.
For a broadcast studio, this could mean millions, not to mention that the downtime will cost even more dearly.
With open source, and open hardware specs The Weather Channel can expect a smooth ride should they find new software incompatible with their existing drivers. All they have to do is update them themselves. They don't have to wait days or weeks for another company to fix it for them (assming they are still in business).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
What? ATI 8500 (and 7500) do not have 10-bit alpha/overlay. Where would the extra bit's come from? 32bits per pixel, 24 bits for RGB, 8 bits for Alpha/overlay.
Perhaps what you mean is they are using a 10bit DAC for output (a claim going back to the Rage128 cards from ATI).
How about providing some proof. A link or something, I find nothing on a search on Google that mentions 10bit overlay, only the 10bit DAC.
On Maxtrox they've actually gone to 2bit Alpha/Overlay, and 10-bits for each R G B for more color depth.
To me, the most exciting thing about this is that it may be the first example of what I believe is a coming shift in the economics of software. Right now, software is treated as a product like almost any other manufactured product. Programmers are laborers and they produce product for consumption.
Free Software turns this around. Programmers become professionals more like engineers, architects, and doctors. They are paid for the quality of their practice, not as units of production in a manufacturing enterprise. One of the most common complaints about Open Source and Free Software is that it is anti-capital and that it will put programmers out of work (or at least out of pay). I think that is just plain wrong. Most programmers working today do not work for software companies. Most work in MIS making systems of hardware and software fit the needs of specific businesses.
This is the first case I know of where a company that is not at all in the software industry is paying programmers to develop software that they need that will directly benefit them AND anyone else who wants to use it. (Several companies like RedHat and Mandrake have done the same over the last few years, but they are, at least in some hybrid sense, in the software industry).
I think this will happen more and more. This is happening right now only because Free Software and Open Source software must be being used at the Weather Channel widely enough that they need these drivers. Once Free Software reaches critical mass (I know: It's an abused term and I'm abusing it right now) this will happen more and more. Eventually it will make almost all kinds of software available for "free" (and Free) and programmers will be paid well for doing it. Instead of 21st century robber barons amassing gigantic fortunes for herding programmers together, thousands of programmers around the world will make more money than they do now developing software for "Free."
Why? Bcause computers and software have no inherent value. Their value comes only in how they improve the efficiency of other processes, or enable processes that could not be done without them. They are tools. They are used to make and do other things. It is this economic "amplification" effect that makes them valuable. Sure, there is some value in the software economy, but the efficiency boom that gave us the longest post-war economic expansion without substantial inflation wasn't entirely based on Microsoft's profits (or even slightly based on them. As rich as Microsoft is, they are just a drop in the bucket of the economy). No, it was the way the technology tools improved productitivty throughout the economy. They whole software industry (and by that I mean people who develop code industrially and keep it closed, raising the price by creating an artificial shortage) could vanish and be replaced by free software and programmers and the economy as a whole would get richer.
How will programmers get paid? Like this case.
So a company has to pay $150,000 to get something developed. If all the other software they use is both Free and free (libre and free? Free speech and Free beer?), they may well end up spending less on software while programmers get that reduced amount of money with little or no corporate overhead.
It becomes a profession, not an industrial enterprise.
My bit of pie-in-the-sky thinking for today...
ATI finally releases specs for their hardware DVD acceleration, if not out in the open, at least to this project. Their hardware DVD acceleration is GREAT in Windows. You can actually run a DVD-ROM on a Pentium 233MMX if you want to using one of their video cards if you don't mind not using the computer for anything else while the DVD plays.
ATI is to be commended for their relative openness compared to NVidia and Matrox. I think they have a ways to go on being cooperative, however since there are only a finite number of video card manufacturers they should be encouraged.
ATI should also be encouraged to find better coders for their Windows driver products, but that's another story for another place and time entirely.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
wasn't the entire point of linux to have a bunch of open source drivers?? (mind you, the thing we keep calling linux is actually only the kernel itself.)
Lets see now, on one hand we have a bunch of binary only drivers that are unstable as crap supporting the next-generation GPU. And on the other hand we have community created open source drivers that are pretty damn stable supporting the 2nd generation chipset??
Sunny Dubey
PS: ask any linux laptop user who has an nvidia video card, on how badly nvidia has fucked them over