On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Felipe Sanches <juca@...2270...> wrote:
Not all inkscape users on linux have any qualms about the propietary drivers, be it due to ideology or any other reason.
Inkscape is a free software project. Then, we shouldn't implement something that REQUIRES users to install proprietary drivers.
We shouldnt require something that requires them to install proprietary drivers, but to outright ignore the possibilty because its not free is just daft. The graphics card your running on isnt open, the processor your using isnt open, yet we use them. Personally I dont mind using proprietary drivers, I already made the choice to buy their hardware, why cant I choose to use their driver? If theres a speed gain to be had, we would we not even consider it based on ideology? Main thought was can it be a Cairo backend?
This means that if we implement support for this vendor-specific, non-standard, hw accel API, we'll have to do it in a way that does not block people from using the current sw-only rendering. Eighter because using the sw renderer may be the only way of working with fully free software, or because the user may choose to stick to old hardware that does not yet support this technology.
Even if you argue that software freedom concerned users may not be a majority of our user-base (and it's not trivial to figure out whether that's the case or not), we shouldn't accept proprietary denpendencies in our code-base.
Felipe Sanches