thelinuxlink.net

He believes that VIA's latest open-source attempts are just more non-sense and that VIA will continue in their binary traditions. In an IRC message to Phoronix, Luc had went on to add, "this will change nothing...they will keep on pushing their un-maintainable code, with binaries included, and will not give users any support at all...they will keep on being years behind with their codebase and binary drivers...they will still only ship half the code they have themselves: via's binaries tend to have a whole lot more symbols than their source base...(tv encoders and tv decoders are in there: saa711x, fs45x, etc)...really, hot air again, like in 2006, when XGI made an announcement."

Another developer that has been weary of this announcement is Xavier Bachelot, who is a developer for the OpenChrome project. The OpenChrome project seeks to create an open-source video driver for various VIA Unichrome IGPs and is a fork of the original Unichrome driver. In a message to Phoronix, Xavier had shared the following:

I'm a bit puzzled at the VIA announcement, as we've been trying to communicate with them without real success for a long time now. I think their announcement is an excellent opportunity to bring some light on our project and I certainly wouldn't want them to claim that they support Linux and FOSS, like they did several times in the past, and don't put their money where their mouth is.

Xavier later added:

VIA never really understood how opensource development works and made their thing on their own, without participating in upstream xorg, drm, mesa, etc... They even forked xine and mplayer to add them the ability to use their proprietary mpeg decode binary blob, never provided them a patch, never tried to communicate with their devs, and ultimately, didn't maintain their fork properly (security...). Their last anti-opensource action is to provide binary only Chrome9 3D drivers. There have been several announcements and advertising campaigns from VIA in the past, saying their product are linux ready and have opensource drivers. This is simply not true as can be easily seen at various places on the web, most notably VIA own forums, and from the fact that no distro are shipping the VIA provided drivers. There have been numerous communication attempts with VIA, but they never showed a great interested, were hard to convince to provide docs even under the terms of their NDA, took very long to answer to mails, and even completely stop communication for months. The latest announcement looks like a step in the right direction, but until I'll see some real facts, it will remain promises.