1. [citation needed]. I've spoken with folks in that community who seem to think everything is OK, which seems to be the null hypothesis. 2. No they're not. The "creators and maintainers" of GNOME royally screwed up its API compatibility at least 3 times now. 3. I didn't say "work in secret". I said "stop telling people about it". Perhaps I should have been clearer: it's fine to tell people you're working on it, it's not fine to tell people that you're going to pull the rug out from under them and replace working infrastructure with some crazy new science experiment which is not even barely functional yet. Especially if you just gave up on a similar project which didn't work out. It's open source, just say "we're trying to come up with something which could, in a couple of years, replace the display subsystem; but don't worry, ISVs, there's nothing you have to do to prepare for this, we won't make it the default until it's ready".
The legal issues with proprietary drivers are eminently possible to work out. Send someone over to nvidia. Do you really think they're going to say "no, you absolutely may not ship our zero cost drivers to your multi-million-user market, because then they might actually have a good experience with our hardware out of the box"? They won't open-source stuff (mostly, in my understanding, due to patent concerns) but unless I severely misunderstand the way this stuff works, they'd be falling over themselves to get drivers included in a distro.
As far as legal counsel telling people not to even attempt to distribute proprietary drivers - again, [citation needed].
Re: tweaks
1. [citation needed]. I've spoken with folks in that community who seem to think everything is OK, which seems to be the null hypothesis.
2. No they're not. The "creators and maintainers" of GNOME royally screwed up its API compatibility at least 3 times now.
3. I didn't say "work in secret". I said "stop telling people about it". Perhaps I should have been clearer: it's fine to tell people you're working on it, it's not fine to tell people that you're going to pull the rug out from under them and replace working infrastructure with some crazy new science experiment which is not even barely functional yet. Especially if you just gave up on a similar project which didn't work out. It's open source, just say "we're trying to come up with something which could, in a couple of years, replace the display subsystem; but don't worry, ISVs, there's nothing you have to do to prepare for this, we won't make it the default until it's ready".
The legal issues with proprietary drivers are eminently possible to work out. Send someone over to nvidia. Do you really think they're going to say "no, you absolutely may not ship our zero cost drivers to your multi-million-user market, because then they might actually have a good experience with our hardware out of the box"? They won't open-source stuff (mostly, in my understanding, due to patent concerns) but unless I severely misunderstand the way this stuff works, they'd be falling over themselves to get drivers included in a distro.
As far as legal counsel telling people not to even attempt to distribute proprietary drivers - again, [citation needed].