We've been over this countless times: a) AMD did not allow us to talk about this until _they_ could make the big announcement. We at suse never got told when this was supposed to be. But Mr Bridgeman (former ATI), with whom you and your friends so happily worked together, was active in enforcing this silence. And he had to, once, very early on, where it turned out that AMD was the source of the leak. b) you were the one who had decided to use the GPL whereas MIT was the common license, and we could not talk to any of you guys because of a) c) The avivo driver was barely a reverse engineering effort. You just dumped some register values and then changed the numbers you could readily spot. Register tracing would've given you a whole lot more useful information, and would've told you how to program the PLLs and other things.
After initial analysis of the code in avivo, we realised that there was not much worth salvaging. We would've of course preferred to build on top of that driver, but you yourself and AMD made that impossible. And we ended up writing 15kloc in 6 weeks, with 2.5 people, and getting something real solid out in (what turned out to be) time, so that ATI could not say "we told you so AMD".
Avivo did play a great role in showing AMD that this was the way forward, and it should be remembered as that, but not more.
To add to all of that, the RadeonHD team did not: * use avivo or radeon code and then remove copyrights. * spread FUD and claim that the avivo or radeon driver were the product of the microsoft conspiracy * copy over painstakingly acquired/reverse engineered fixes from avivo or radeon, silently, and then turn around and bash avivo or radeon for not working on $way_too_early_or_useless_feature_X_or_Y * remarket proper C code as "legacy" and unchangeable firmware as "scripts" * silently remove avivo and radeon drivers from the standard Xorg build scripts * hack the avivo or radeon git repositories using freedesktop admin rights
Re: Great catch.
a) AMD did not allow us to talk about this until _they_ could make the big announcement. We at suse never got told when this was supposed to be. But Mr Bridgeman (former ATI), with whom you and your friends so happily worked together, was active in enforcing this silence. And he had to, once, very early on, where it turned out that AMD was the source of the leak.
b) you were the one who had decided to use the GPL whereas MIT was the common license, and we could not talk to any of you guys because of a)
c) The avivo driver was barely a reverse engineering effort. You just dumped some register values and then changed the numbers you could readily spot. Register tracing would've given you a whole lot more useful information, and would've told you how to program the PLLs and other things.
After initial analysis of the code in avivo, we realised that there was not much worth salvaging. We would've of course preferred to build on top of that driver, but you yourself and AMD made that impossible. And we ended up writing 15kloc in 6 weeks, with 2.5 people, and getting something real solid out in (what turned out to be) time, so that ATI could not say "we told you so AMD".
Avivo did play a great role in showing AMD that this was the way forward, and it should be remembered as that, but not more.
To add to all of that, the RadeonHD team did not:
* use avivo or radeon code and then remove copyrights.
* spread FUD and claim that the avivo or radeon driver were the product of the microsoft conspiracy
* copy over painstakingly acquired/reverse engineered fixes from avivo or radeon, silently, and then turn around and bash avivo or radeon for not working on $way_too_early_or_useless_feature_X_or_Y
* remarket proper C code as "legacy" and unchangeable firmware as "scripts"
* silently remove avivo and radeon drivers from the standard Xorg build scripts
* hack the avivo or radeon git repositories using freedesktop admin rights
How often do i need to repeat the above?
Luc Verhaegen.