From: Rowan van der Molen <bigsmoke@usa.net>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 22:37:39 +0100

Re: The battles.

At 09:19 31-01-99 -0500, you wrote:
>
>As most of you have seen. I have been trying to reason with the kernel
>guys about accels. The only sane one their is fabrice and me. I realized
>it was hopeless when I asked the question should only a kernel bug take
>down a machine or should any app be allowed to take down a OS. When many 
>answered yes I fell over in shock. Many replied that you can do rm -rf /
>and take down a system. In my opinon a person as root that misuses a
>program and trashes a system is very different from someone who writes a
>program that can trash a system. One is on purpose the other is not. Me
>and fabrice are still working on the patch. I'm reworking the patch so
>safe userland accels are a option. If it is rejected by linus only because
>of the accels then I will remove the accel support. The patch without
>accel still allows non root user to use /dev/fb safely. It just you can't
>use any advanced feature of the card. 
>
>  This reminds me of the flame wars when glibc came out. The linux
>community at first rejected and hated glibc. I even remeber the writer of
>glibc once post that he regreted ever writing a free open source library
>and he would never do something like this again for anyone. Well he still
>pressed on and in the end most modern systems use glibc because his
>company cygnus wrote a better library than the linux community could. 
> 
>  We have been think wrong. Jon getting the job made me realize this. We
>have been begging and bending over backwards to get into the main steam
>kernel. Thats not the way to go. The true is as linux becomes more popular
>more companies are going to write drivers for their hardware. Creative
>labs is one of the first but not one of the last. The writing of drivers
>will shift out of our hands into the companies hands that make these
>devices. That is the way it should be Open Source or not because they know
>details of the hardware more than any one of use could know. Since most
>companies will not give out details we can never write the drivers that
>the cards really need. I have no problem with writing binary only drivers
>under NDA as long as their good drivers that support all the features the
>card has to offer. We need to go to the COMPANIES and tell them we will
>write full blown drivers NDA or not and provid ethem to the community.
>I don't like Microsoft software but under windows you need to support only
>to drivers. The basic one and DirectX. Under linux you need to support 
>libsvga, X server, Xserver with GLX extensions, Mesa, OpenGL , and libggi.
>Whould you want to modify all those programs for your card especially when
>in 6 months the card with no longer be the leading edge. It just not worth
>it. So lets go to the companies. I don't know if you seen my patch yet but
>take a look and see how fabrice and me handled accels. This way not only
>provides low overhead but a universal API that companies can follow. Yes
>it is possible to have a universal API for all cards. We did find away.
>The patch is at http://www.stud.enst.fr/~bellard/

>
This is the most sanely post I've read in ages. Linus is no god, we're using
OpenSource so let''s please go the way we believe in :)