[cairo] glitz and shader programs

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

Andrew Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 04:38, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> 
>>Going forward, I don't really see any of the major players (read: nvidia 
>>and ATI) becoming any more "open source" friendly, as far as hardware 
>>documentation goes -- we'll probably be stuck with proprietary drivers 
>>for some time now, fairly good ones in nvidia's case, and horrid ones in 
>>ATI's case.
> 
> I know its a side track to the general conversation, but, to try and
> stop this myth again... ATI is VERY open  source friendly. In fact a
> good majority of the X ati driver was written by someone at ATI(who
> presumably has full documentation), and they have given full
> documentation to the gatos people for new cards as recent as the 9700.
> The proprietary drivers were only released for the general consumer
> cards at the communities request, they have never intended to fully
> support it, and cannot open source it because of third party components
> internally. 

Sorry, I should have phrased things better.  By 'more "open source" 
friendly', I meant "release all the documentation necessary to do a 
fully hardware accelerated open-source OpenGL implementation".  Anything 
less than that isn't good enough, IMO.  ATI has done far better than 
nVidia as far as open source goes -- I've stuck with ATI for a while now 
because of this.  However, the end user isn't going to care about who's 
friendly to open source and who's not.  They're going to care about 
which hardware is better supported under linux, and right now that's 
nVidia hardware, with their proprietary drivers.

Making things work in glitz without support for higher-end features 
should certainly be part of the plan -- but not at the expense of not 
taking advantage of those higher end features if they're supported. 
Longhorn scales back its graphics based on hardware capabilities; 
ideally, glitz/cairo should do the same, instead of going for the lowest 
common denominator.

	- Vlad