[omegaworks]

Thing is, Linux was never intended to run the latest greatest desktop gaming hardware. It was intended to be an open architecture where people contribute from all around the world to make something larger then themselves.

All of these people pretty much contribute their free time to it.

If they can't make basic architectural decisions that improve the worst kinds of work (driver authorship and maintenance is awful drudgery) how can you expect them to feel any kind of ownership over their fate?

You're asking unpaid people to do the work people get paid for. Even worse, when this work just gets dumped on those unpaid people by people who are paid quite well.

[egil]

Most work on Linux is paid[0]. However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking.

[0] 4.5 Development statistics https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/. Just google lwn Development statistics for more.

[mixedCase]

>However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking.

Oh but it is in their employers' interest. It's the price of admission for mainline. And if they want in on mainline, wether simply to harvest PR or to net a contract that demands a mainlined kernel; they have to pay it. Just another case of the well-known "cost of doing business".

In the case of AMD I believe they want to reap the benefits of mainline (that is, not having to support the breakage that comes with being out of tree) and to be able to compete better with Nvidia; since AMD is unlikely to ever develop an OpenGL implementation as good as theirs but Nvidia cannot or is unlikely to be able to open source their driver.

[tracker1]

It might be different if AMD, Nvidia and Intel all agreed on a longer term HAL, but that isn't the case... and 100kloc is pretty huge for a single vendor.