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Open Graphics Project Looking For Funding
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Graphics Project was formed last year to create a free and open source friendly graphics card. According to this article on KernelTrap, the project lost their company backing a couple of months ago, but has decided to go forward with the effort with money from the developer's own pockets. The team plans to release a prototype card to the public in November, at which time they'll need to find $1 million dollars for the effort to continue." I continue to wonder about the Open Hardware projects but call me skeptical- people contribute to Open Source because it typically costs little more than time.
The fabrication costs for one run of these cards can be huge. Even going with 130 nm technology (which is already "outdated") can cost a million dollars just for the masks. Yield, packaging, and other issues can easily push up the costs to several times that.
People also contribute to FOSS out of a sense of duty, or of pride, or because of the perception of a superior product, or because all the cool kids are doing it, or to pad their resume, or to save money in the long run, or out of sheer necessity, or to scratch an itch, or because they are bored... et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
-theGreater Counterexample.Previous articles on this effort have made it clear that the graphics card was not going to have very many 'modern' features at all. Not, of course, that that's a bad thing--I mean, this effort is clearly targetted at hobbyists and other people who like to get 'close to the metal'. But it begs the question why any company would get behind an effort that is only meant to appeal to a very small subset of the consumer base? I'm saddened by the fact that they lost their company backing, but from a pure cost/benefit standpoint, it (sadly) makes sense.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I'm going to say all the bad things I can think of so we don't have to waste time rereading them all day.
1. The hardware will be underpowered because this group has little experience (if any) designing bleeding edge graphics hardware
2. The card will be overpriced because this group doesn't have the manufacturing clout of NVidia or ATI
3. The drivers will suck because nobody's going to buy this card and nobody will develop for it.
4. The drivers will suck MORE because of all the trans-gamers out there who dual boot, they won't get the card because it won't be supported in Windows (or just very weakly).
5. The company has no financial backing, so they will crash and burn early on and we will be stuck with abandoned hardware.
6. This time, effort and money would be better spent harassing the existing graphics card manufacturers into opening up their drivers, as least the non-trade-secret parts so we can do our magic on it.
7. (asbestos ON) I still don't think any Linux Distro in its current state should even be considered for desktop or gaming. But that's me being an elitist prick. Come up with a cleaner development model, make it "just work", and redo the whole windowing system into something that is NOT X, and maybe then we can start talking. The reason OSX works so well is because it does fifty backflips to almost completely hide the underlying Unix layer. It's not because I know Linux that I want to put up with its PMS all the time, sometimes it's nice to just click things with your brain switched off.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I think the idea here is that barebones 2d graphics controllers would be highly desired by barebones-system makers. So the tack is totally backwards from ATI and Nvidia, who lead from the high-end: an open good-enough option might make it in the low-end.
You're quoting prices for very SMALL FPGAs. What makes you think we could fit something as complex as a GPU into a 3S200?
They are not trying to compete with nvidia , They are trying to produce an open source graphics board.Everything , every last little bit will be open to us to tweak and examin .
,open graphics adaptor for 2d that is 100% supported in all operating systems ( givin enough time ).
Most people wont be able to do much with it , but if the project takes flight and i hope it does . Then we could all be able to get a lovely cheap open piece of hardware that by its very being will be fully supported in the OSS world.
It will be a great learning tool aswell
Which in all means for those of us without great need for much 3d procesing in our workstation computer or server computer..
A reliable, cheap
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The only way to fund this project is to find a company or group of companies who spend significantly more than $1m per year on commodity graphics technology, and who would be happy to switch to an open standard where they can share the costs and offload R&D work to a wider community.
I'd say, motherboard producers, who today pay royalties for on-board graphics cards.
Forget about asking the "community" to put up the money, it's not going to happen.
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Why not "sell" this project for teaching hardware design at the local universities? Isn't that one of the goals of open source? Get the graphics giants to fund it and produce talented students from the course!
The market for this card is geeks, hackers and open source die hards.
Most will already have the latest kickass graphics card in a machine
I am a geek and an open source die hard.
I absolutely do not have the lasest kickass card precicely because there is no open source support for those newer cards. Currently I have an ATI9200se which is the best card I could find that has fully functional open source xorg drivers that do 2d and 3d accelleration. It cost me about 25UKP. Hardly the latest kick ass card.
I am willing to pay around 100UKP for a better card if is fully supported with open source drivers.
I am not really interested in a reprogrammable fpga but I would support a company that provided it because I can see that others would be interested.
For me, being fully supportive of open source _is_ the unique selling point.
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But really, it is less about standards. It's more about open. None of the existing manufacturers publish their hardware specs enough to allow open drivers. The alternatives are to reverse engineer it (very difficult), convence the manufacturere to publish specs (not likely) or make your own damn card (expensive).
Actually, if some third teir card maker were to jump on the bandwagon and offer to publish specs and help the project, they would probably get a lot of publicity, along with a lot of open source customers. It might be a big boost for the likes of Matrox or S3.
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Very much agree. If this card is not for gaming, then it should support a lot of other useful things.
XVideo being one of them. Mpeg decoding is another. Motion Compensation / Deinterlacing would be cool too. Compositing so that X can be pretty would be nice.
And perhaps, if the card is a reprogrammable card, then what would be cool is an ability to customize the card to the needs of the user. Say I would like compositing, but do not plan to run MPEG movies, so I will have one and not have another. However, I have no clue if plugin-able hardware is possible.
As far as AGP goes, I think the card is aiming at PCI, if I remember correctly. As the card is not "high end", it does not need the AGP badwidth, as it will not be shoving textures back and forth. On the other hand, it may be useful if they implement video or compositing.
badness 10000
...people contribute to Open Source because it typically costs little more than time.
Time is te most precious commodity of all. Most of us don't realize this until we notice how little we have left (terminal illness diagnosis, old age, a loved one dying, in the middle of a motorcycle wreck, etc).
All of life is a barter system. Most people in "modern", "civilized" societies simply fail to recognize this, and think of money as the only medium that matters in trade.
This isn't in any way dissing people who put time into FOSS (I do). It's just a reality check against the concept that it's free if you "only" put time into it. Rather, it is more dearly bought.
Can something be setup so that contributions to Open Source initiatives are Tax deductible? Open source benefits society. These organization should be able to secure loot.
I'd like more info on this if it's already in effect. Is a contribution to the Mozilla Foundation tax deductible?
Is this serious?
Amidst all the scoffing here, am I the only one who sees a semi-bright future for us though this and alike projects?
I'm talking about DRM, TCPA, police-ware, Palladium - whatever it's called now - the only substantial threat to our freedom of computing movement. Not just the ability to install this week's trendy flavor of Linux on your Gateway, but the whole concept of using a computer as anything more than a glorified VCR is at steak here. The Internet is a powerful tool, for the rapid dissemination of unflattering information, organization, collaboration, it breads free-speech and revolutionary ideas - and does many other things scary to those in power. And the easiest way to kill it? Pull the plug on consumer hardware. Lock it down, restrict it. Subject all files to corporate/government run blacklists. Force viewing of advertisements and propaganda. And whether this is implemented by a bipartisan corporate consortium or stone cast in law, that's largely irrelevant. As long as it's implemented slowly (so people don't notice), and it's ubiquitous - there are no alternatives, it will largely put any social gains we've made in the last 20 years (especially the last 10) on ice.
And my friends, assuming this dark prediction unfolds, Open Hardware would go underground (along with freedom), and that might be our only means of real communication.