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Weather Channel Sponsors OSS ATI Radeon Drivers

Posted by michael on from the cold-front-coming-in-from-the-west dept.

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."

5 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense. by pirodude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They're probably intrested in new and interesting graphics for their channel and most of their software probably runs on a system that uses Xwindows. By funding the development they not only get the drivers they need but also get to help out the community.

    1. Re:Makes sense. by #undefined · · Score: 4, Interesting

      this is great to see as this has been touted (by others and myself) to be where open source makes the most sense to a company: non-business-core computer software.

      the weather channel's primary business is grabbing eyeballs (to sell itself to cable companies or to sell air-time through commercials during its segments) and it does that through weather forecasting.

      video drivers are not the mainstay of their business, but definitely help them in their business. the weather channel doesn't care about selling video drivers. that's not their business. they just need video drivers. and they can pay someone else to create those video drivers and then give the source code away without "selling the farm": giving away a business secret to a competitor.

      this would be the same as a music production company paying someone to produce open source drivers for a sound card. the company gets drivers, free support from the community, and yet doesn't give away its secrets or the upper hand to competitors. it's a win-win situation for the company and the community.

      this is how i expect to see open source prevail in the future: companies paying for open source development that aids their business (but is not their sole business), and the action being justified by knowing that the open source community (that has an interest in the developed software) will support (to some degree) the software.

      in the weather channel's case, this made perfect sense.

  2. for gaming though? by 2ms · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are drivers, and then there are drivers that you actually want to play games with.

    On account of ATI's generally/traditionally superior image quality, I'd get a Radeon over a Geforce if it weren't for that nvidia linux drivers actually take advantage of all the card's hardware features. My experience with owning an older Radeon has been that even the most concerted DRI efforts haven't put half of the Radeon's features into effect. Thus, I do not want to play games in linux with my radeon.

    Is it possible that The Weather Channel will get the Radeon's gaming features working in full? If not, then this doesn't really change anything for Radeons in linux.

    If you don't care about gaming, then this news isn't very notable because the 2D is already good. Otherwise, any incompleteness of 3D features will just perpetuate the Radeon's status as pointless for linux when geforce available.

    On the other hand, it's true that nothing comes close to radeons in the mobile department (considering things like their low energy consumption on dvd accel). So I guess there definately are people compelled to buy a radeon despite superiority of geforce drivers, who must we welcoming of any and everything they can get in radeon support.

  3. Re:Shareholders first question by fsdb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > What if they feel like using one of the *BSD's?

    The are using one of the BSD's. :-)
    Look at all the FreeBSD commit emails with "Sponsored by: The Weather Channel".

  4. Re:I just don't get it. by Knightmare · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This actually makes a bit of sense to me. I was at a IBM DeveloperWorld conference where the CTO of the weather channel was a pannel speaker. And he was very greatful to IBM and the Apache foundation and all the other people out there who had worked on the software that runs their platform. He seemed like a really decent guy and this might just be their way of saying thanks.