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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.
They want to make a free graphics card? No wonder they need funding!
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 Even going with 130 nm technology (which is already "outdated") can cost a million dollars just for the masks.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.
Hardware is quite a bit different then software, being a physical tangible item that isn't easily copied/manufactured.
While I do wish them well, I still have trouble seeing how this will really make headway.
I do know that if what they come up with is capable and affordable, as in the hardware won't cost me more then my current PC cost to build, I will give their resulting product a go.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
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 don't understand how this is any different than having an open standard with open-source drivers? It seems to me this is roughly the same thing, but without the big companies, years of experience, corporate support, or breadth of input. Does someone want to enlighten me on the fundamental difference I'm missing?
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
Just to make it clear:
(1) The OGP product is OPEN ARCHITECTURE. It's intended to be compatible with open source SOFTWARE.
(2) There is a specific plan to make the "blueprints" to the hardware also available under GPL and LGPL at various points. ALL of the IP and schematics for the first product (the prototype board) will be open source.
(3) Hardware always costs money.
(4) This is a real product, being designed by experienced hardware engineers who have all the expertise necessary to do it. To the hardware designers it is not a "hobby".
yeah, but, just like open source, you can still change for the boards and open up the source, or in this case, building specs, programming code etc.
It would definately be interesting to have an fpga based board with the board programming code source available and the hardware specs available. That way, you could fiddle with your board and get it to do what you want, just like open source. It could be a viable business if they were charging for the boards themselves, but letting people play with the internal components a bit more than with proprietary. I can see lots of hardware geeks / hobbyists buying them just for the experience of playing.
...no two people are not on fire.
You're quoting prices for very SMALL FPGAs. What makes you think we could fit something as complex as a GPU into a 3S200?
It seems, the sophistication of the commercial offerings is rather substantial. True, Xorg/XFree86 are usually unable to take full advantage of it.
But will the new cards not be hardware-limited to what the commercial ones can already do even with the incomplete drivers?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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, so will NOT be interested in a lower performing graphics card simply because they can get all the hardware specs for it.
What they will be interested in is if it has something cool or kinky about it.
Such things would be... do the whole lot on reprogrammable fpga so people can really customise... provide some interesting DSP like four AL3101 chips or a sharc so it can do audio processing too.... make a low power version for tiny/embedded computers (put it on a gumstix board!).... put a xscale on the card so it's a computer.... provide interesting buffered IO so you can use it as a video signal generator...
It has to have a unique selling point over and above being open source!
Merely open-sourcing the drivers isn't enough. XGI and VIA have done that. In order to make open source drivers truly valiable, hackers have to be able to FIX them when there are bugs. That's very difficulty when the vendor doesn't release full specs on their hardware.
The OGP is based around open specs.
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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The promise of a well designed graphic card which is thightly integrated into the kernel is the reason why I am ready to put money on this project. A lot of people are paying high price to get a few more FPS on their favorite games. I feel paying a high price for an openly designed product is more important.
Why doesn't IBM adopt the project? They have once produced graphics cards!
It is highly unlikely that you'll be able to
program an FPGA to do something faster than a
modern computer can do.
Now that's just nonsense. This is the thinking of "More MHz is better". The truth is that a custom chip design targetted at a specific task can easily out-perform a more generic chip. For example, the SaarCor can render a raytraced scene many times faster than a Pentium IV, using nothing more than off-the-shelf FPGA hardware running at 1/300th the MHz.
That being said, it's doubtful that the OGP will outperform someone like NVidia or ATI who already build custom chips. But it might be able to give them a decent run for their money.
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Nvidia and ATI have yet to really address the MythTV crowd with a passively cooled, inexpensive (who cares about 3D specs for their myth box?) AGP card that can do all the heavy lifting of decoding HD MPEGs.
pchdtv.com amd mythtv.org are pretty much the only places you'd need to "advertise".
You've got a community of enthusiasts that understand the point of open specs, are willing to experiment with hardware to "get it right" and aren't being well served by the incumbents. Sounds like a match to me...
Seeing how this is a very important effort, I would like to see this project/experiment succeed, even if what it produces is not quite what I / others need.
Is there a way that I could give $20-$50 dollars donation unconditionally (I know this is not a charitable donation), and then guarantee that I will purchase the card if it costs less than $200?
Perhaps the developers could offer incentives for people who do this. I do not know hardware, but I assume that FPGA card is the same as ASIC, except that it can be reprogrammed. In that case an incentive could be the card, which then does not have to be repurchased once revisions are made in hardware. (the donation then could be the difference between the FPGA cost and the ASIC cost, and then the donation is not donation, but partial-preorder).
Basically, I am a bit uncomfortable with parting with too much money with no guarantees, but I am willing to part with some. More, if there are more incentives. But idea of pure pre-order will not work, as there is no guarantee that the card will be finished, and $200 is more than I am willing to just throw away.
badness 10000
...where a millionaire like Mark Shuttleworth could make a significant difference. Yet another debian clone is cute, but actually attacking the durn hardware problem is even better. You can't rely on ANY of the hardware manufacturers out there to make open source a number one goal, not with the borg still dominating the industry. For that matter he has the loot (and resources to find some more loot from VCs and whatnot) to release desktops servers laptops and pdas all built from the ground up with open source compatability and functionality. And get them on the shelves at the local retailer level all over. That would get some mainstream attention.
Open source will not crack the mainstream in any significant numbers until it's for sale and pre installed on machines at the local level, not mail order or just on the web. That means it's the hardware sellers who hold the keys, including graphics. You can code all de doo dah day long, and it won't matter much, until millions of PCs are shipped with some linux preinstalled,at a competitive price, it will remain niche and small numbers.
I hope these guys in the article can get funding someplace.
No, seriously. I have no money. My name is Darl and I gambled everything I had, plus several million dollars of other folk's money, and I lost miserably. I'm roaming the country now, going from public terminal to public terminal, trying to stay clear of the pissed of investors and the hitmen they've hired. I couldn't even sell my soul for money if I tried.
...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.
...then you just don't "get it" at all--not what is possible in hardware engineering today, nor the philospohy behind Free (libre) and open systems.
Up to a certain complexity, fab services are available even to home hobbyists for a reasonable cost, and for large runs it is quite inexpensive. The REALLY big cost is in SET-UP costs to produce ASICs. Besides, fabrication costs are no different than for proprietary hardware--the licensing model for the intellectual property has nothing to do with how hard it is to physically build it.
Furthermore, even if the production model will be expensive to get going, these days hardware engineering is like programming--you don't sit at a desk taping out masks and such like they did when they made the 6502 processor. Its all source code in Verilog or VHDL these days. Therefore, if Linux can be successful then why not open hardware?
It is in the development/engineering where these cards can have an edge over ATI and NVidia--they pay massive dollars to hire people to design the hardware and drivers and lawyers to keep it all secret. This project has no monetary design costs. I for one don't even care if they don't ever produce a single card themselves, as long as they get the evaluation FPGA board and all the source designs/code complete. THAT is what is most important, besides having some manufacurers pick up the design.
Money is the least important part of this project. The industry is going to start stagnating now becasue the players are much too proprietary--by hoarding information and research they duplicate efforts and slow or stop development of interoperability standards. Insistence on keeping drivers proprietary hurts the software industry (particularly open projects and smaller proprietary competitors) and props up Microsoft.
Last but not least, an open design lowers the barrier of entry for smaller players and others who do not have graphics IP--right now card makers are at the mercy of two major players who design and make chips. If this project succeeds, many other chip makers can make graphics cards AND chips. Also, since the design is open, even if a chip maker discontinues or goes bankrupt others can use the design themselves. Widely licensing to many chipmakers is the biggest reason why the 6502 CPU was so successful--it was produced by MOSTek/Commodore, Rockwell, NCR, GTE, WDC, Synertek and many more. If Commodore hoarded its design and made all the chips themselves, do you really think so many computer makers, including arch-rivals Apple and Atari, would've stuck with the 6502 for so long if they only had one company--a sometimes competitor--to depend on for their CPU? Even if the 6502 was the cheaper option I doubt they would be comfortable with that. WDC and Rockwell also kept that design alive lonnger and improved it where Commodore wouldn't (CMOS version, added more defined opcodes, 16-bit extensions...).
If these guys play their cards right--especially if they can put out a few thousand GPU chips and get the ball rolling for others to jump on board it could revolutionise the industry and level the playing field for Linux and others on the desktop--and the more people on board the more rapidly the design could be improved. And unlike the case with the 6502, these improvements could be shared and standardised--and chip makers who contribute these enhancements can still have "first mover" advantage as an incentive to innovate.
If I was a well-to-do player in the Linux/open source community like Bob Young I'd certainly throw a few million their way...