Hello list,
usually I only follow this list to keep an eye
on the development of linux 3D drivers, but
lately there was a discussion about how this
efford can be continued to be financed, or
how more financing can be obtained.
I would envision a project like this:
10 people working fulltime on reverse engineering
of newly arriving chipsets: producing enough
documentation for a programmer to write a driver.
No prior documentation required, but anything
that can be laid hands on in a legal way would
of course be very helpful. But nobody signs
any non disclosure agreements, and if manufacturers
don't like it: they are sore out of luck.
Estimated time per chipset for this: 4 man months.
(And less for newer versions of the same chipset,
like geforce2 -> geforce3)
10 people working on writing generalized drivers
implementing a 3D graphics pipeline/and other
specialized features like mpeg decoding,
DVI out, video in/out, TV etc.
Estimated time for this: 2 man months per driver.
The people you need for this cost about $50000
per year in Europe, $100000 per year in USA,
$10000 per year in India.
So that would cost you about 1 million $ per
year if done in Europe, 2 million $ in USA,
and $200000 in India.
Of course that is only counting wages; multiply
roughly by 2 to include office space, computers
and specialized equipment like logic analysers,
and travel costs etc.
Now let people prepay for drivers, say $40 per
driver. To run this project for a year you
would need 100000 people donating in the USA
based case.
Per year you would produce about 120 drivers
this way. And how many _really_ distinct drivers
do you really need per year to cover all the
good new cards coming out? Maybe 20?
Considering that number, and the fact that for
legal reasons having to do with the legality
of reverse engineering in Europe, where the
wages are half those in the USA (but that money
buys you roughly the same), a team of 10
would probably be enough.
That would take 25000 donaters, raising about
$1000000.
I really think it should be possible to find
this many donaters, certainly if the donation
would be part of the price of a real boxed
product like a game or a distro.
License: free (as in MIT/X or GPL or BSD) after
half a year, for pay if you want to use your
hot new card right now. The Aladin license of
ghostscript.
So I think it is possible, and I certainly
would donate upto $100 for a really fast and
stable driver, provided the driver would be
totally free (both license and price) after
half a year.
Roland Nagtegaal
_______________________________________________
Dri-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
