New ATI Driver

[Dotan Cohen]

On 20/07/07, manchicken <manchicken at notsosoft.net> wrote:
> On Friday 20 July 2007 06:18:28 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> [snip]
> > As right as you are, _any_ improvements in official Linux support from
> > major manufacturers such as ATI/AMD is a step in the right direction.
> > It will set precedent to the smaller manufacturers.
>
> Except that it's not the smaller manufacturers that are a problem.  It is
> particularly the large manufacturers that are the problem.  They use their
> market share to marginalize and exclude those who are contrary to their goals
> or are simply less profitable.  THAT is what the problem is.  It's not that
> they can't, it's that they won't, and they never will until they're in a
> situation where they have no other choice.

So make it profitable for them. Have everyone you know write to them.
I do it all the time. See:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/linux_compatibility.php

> Buying their cards and using their proprietary drivers does nothing but
> encourage this negative behavior.  I fully support proprietary drivers for
> those who didn't know when they got their machine that they were going to
> have this issue.  The people who do know better, however, should probably
> consider buying better so that they don't get this problem in the future and
> so that they don't encourage this behavior.

Unfortunately, I didn't know and I'm stuck with an X1400 in this Dell
Inspiron. But I write to companies that I don't even have their
hardware, to display that Linux users exist. If 1% of Linux users
wrote to one hardware company a week, do you have any idea about what
kind of a difference we could make?

> A step in the right direction would be releasing code or specs or promising
> not to sue those who reverse engineer things.  This isn't a step in the right
> direction, it is merely a continuance of prior bad behavior.

Have you heard of the Linux Drive Initiative? Tell the hardware
companies about it.

Dotan Cohen

http://lyricslist.com/
http://what-is-what.com/