Graphics drivers

“There are only two tasks harder than writing Free Software
graphics drivers. One is running a successful crocodile petting
zoo, the other is wireless bungee jumping.

“In general writing graphics drivers is hard. The number of
people who can actually do it is very small and the ones who can do
it well are usually doing it full-time already. Unless the company,
which those folks are working for, supports open drivers, the
earliest someone can start working on open drivers is the day the
hardware is officially available. That’s already about 2 years too
late, maybe a year if the hardware is just an incremental update.
Obviously not a lot of programmers have the motivation to do that.
Small subset of the already very small subset of programmers who
can write drivers. Each of them worth their weight in gold (double,
since they’re usually pretty skinny).

“Vendors who ship hardware with GNU/Linux don’t see a lot of
value in having open graphics drivers on those platforms. All the
Android phones are a good example of that. Then again Android
decided to use Skia, which right now is simply the worst of the
vector graphics frameworks out there”

Complete
Story