Slashdot Mirror
Broadcom Releases Source For Graphics Stack; Raspberry Pi Sets Bounty For Port
One of the few but lingering complaints about the Raspberry Pi is that it relies on a proprietary GPU blob for communication between the graphics drivers and the hardware. Today, Broadcom released the full source for the OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 driver stack for the Broadcom VideoCore IV 3D graphics subsystem running on one of its popular cellphone systems-on-a-chip. It's available under a BSD license, and Broadcom provided documentation for the graphics core as well. The SoC in question is similar to the one used on the Raspberry Pi, and Eben Upton says making a port should be 'relatively straightforward.' The Raspberry Pi Foundation has offered a $10,000 bounty for the first person who can demonstrate a functional port. (The test for functionality is, of course, being able to run Quake III Arena.) Upton says, 'This isn't the end of the road for us: there are still significant parts of the multimedia hardware on BCM2835 which are only accessible via the blob. But we're incredibly proud that VideoCore IV is the first publicly documented mobile graphics core, and hope this is the first step towards a blob-free future for Raspberry Pi.' Side note: the RPi is now two years old, and has sold 2.5 million units.
If I spend days writing a GPU core port, I MIGHT get $10,000, unless someone beat me to it.
I appreciate the injection of funds into the open source community, but that's no way to run an economy. Hire someone. If you want more than one implementation or you want to have it fast, hire multiple people and offer a bonus for completion. But if you do the latter, don't expect to actually use the first one you receive, as it will likely be the shoddiest, meeting the bare minimum of your specs.
Someone had to do it.
At this point, I have concluded that many slashdotters are "hipster geeks"
Anything that gains traction and is widely known outside of the normal geek circles becomes "uncool" and is slammed down. As you can see for raspberry, although the things to bitch about are getting fewer and fewer, there are always things that slashdotters bitch about. I'm pretty sure that even if they resolve everything, slashdotters will bitch about its color.
Now think what would happen if only a couple of thousand raspis were sold and only part of the geek community knew about it. It would be all the rage!