On Sun, 2011-10-16 at 09:01 +0300, Jari Rahkonen wrote:
be it due to ideology or any other reason.
We all should be aware that those other reasons you allude to are not simply other political ideals. We should concern ourselves with the exclusion of users with different hardware(1), with the sustainability and longevity of proprietary codebases(2) and the increased costs to us in investing in them(3).
I know there are plenty of people who object to ideologies, but we should at least agree that proprietary code comes with hidden costs that we must carefully weigh up on any decision to adopt new technology.
My own opinion is that application software has no business talking hardware APIs and that a path should be beaten through xorg or another graphics stack or library to at least give the opportunity to flatten out the support for the functionality and not just offer it to other graphics hardware but also to other application software too.
This is just the wrong level for this.
Martin,
(1), ATI, Intel and some SIS, with standards like opengl being important for cross support. (2), See all the studies done on the mess created in propritary development, see the ati proprietary driver for a perfect proof. I don't even want to see the nvidia code base tbh. (3), Increased complexity of the rendering engine at this level would be very bad.