VIA’s Linux TODO List… Maybe Look Forward To 2011?

[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]

“Nearly two years ago at the Linux Foundation Summit in Austin
was VIA’s most recent announcement about becoming serious with
open-source support. This was not VIA’s first time they claimed to
back an open-source strategy, which led a number of open-source
developers to immediately call VIA’s open-source strategy a bluff.
To date this still is mostly a bluff, but they have produced some
fluff. In 2010 it looks like this will still be the case, but VIA
hopes to produce some code by the second half of 2010. This code,
however, will likely not appear in most Linux distributions until
2011.

“Since that 2008 announcement (which came two years after they
stopped an earlier open-source attempt) there has been some 2D and
3D documentation published by VIA Technologies for some of its
integrated graphics processors and they have made some patches,
created a new DDX driver (though it has gone virtually nowhere),
and they also improved the frame-buffer driver. This work though is
absolutely no comparison to the amount of code, patches, and other
work that has been done by AMD and their partners since they
announced their own open-source strategy back in September of 2007.
VIA Technologies also hired Harald Welte as an open-source liaison,
but he didn’t even do much and is no longer contracted by VIA. As
is shown in our most recent Linux Graphics Survey, these half-baked
open-source attempts haven’t done anything to increase VIA’s
market-share.”

Complete Story