End of year Xorg status rant

[Matthew Macy]

 ---- On Sat, 31 Dec 2016 18:47:23 -0800 Thomas Mueller <mueller6722 at twc.com> wrote ---- 
 >  
 > excerpt from O. Hartmann: 
 >  
 > > I think we face a political problem, not so much a man-power-driven one. nVidia provides 
 > > a BLOB, this BLOB works well even with the most recent hardware of theirs, but it lacks 
 > > in support for OpenCL and their own CUDA acceleration framework. I never understood why. 
 > > I asked nVidia - and they told me, that there is no request from the community ... so 
 > > far. That is a claim and I can not hold something against it, since it seems obvious 
 > > that I'm, with some other single people, are the only one compared to millions of others 
 > > - de facto Null so to speak. 
 >   
 > > And AMD? Well, 2006 or 2008 the company claimed to support the opensource community 
 > > better than before, but that left in history to be a insubstancial claim. Their hardware 
 > > might be a great deal even for GPGPU purposes with OpenCL, but this is Linux only as far 
 > > as I can tell. 
 >  
 > I too noticed that nVidia and AMD were not open-source-friendly with their graphics; remember Linus Torvalds' comments and cusses regarding nVidia. 
 >  
 > That's why I chose Intel on my last computer hardware purchases; I use Intel on-CPU graphics. 
 >  

Yes, we can leave it to AMD to snatch defeat to defeat from the jaws of victory.

Nonetheless, companies management turns over and their policies change. AMD is *currently* very much committed to bringing their open source Linux driver up to par with what they have on Windows. They are also committed to a fully open source high performance GPGPU compute stack. They should be rewarded for what their *current* policies are if we want to encourage that. If they again back off from that stance - then yes, leave them to their own devices.

-M