Ask Harald Welte, "VIA's open source representative"

In this recent Slashdot post kernel hacker Harald Welte was characterized as "VIA's open source representative," but that is just one of many irons he has in the fire, as a glance at his Wikipedia bio will show. You can obviously ask Harald about many interesting things besides VIA's open source strategy — and before you ask about VIA, you ought to read the last few entries on his blog, at least one of which mentions VIA questions he can't answer. But VIA aside, there's plenty to ask Harald about. For example, he won an award from the FSF earlier this year for his work on gpl-violations.org. In any case, Harald is a powerful force for GNU/Linux and Free Software, and we appreciate him taking time out of his undoubtedly hectic schedule to answer your questions. (Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.)

Comments

Support for end users

[AmiMoJo]

The only way to take advantage of the hardware acceleration for H.264 on the C7 platform is using a patched version of mplayer on Linux. That's nice for Linux users and open source people, but it didn't help get support on Windows or in Media Centre. I returned my EPIA board because of this (not fit for purpose).

How is supporting open source going to make these features available to end users who don't use an open source OS and/or who can't code, i.e. the majority? Or is this just an attempt to get out of costly software development to support your hardware?