[izacus]

There's also nothing pragmatic in one-sidedly denying contributions without understanding the case that rewriting a whole business stack for a minor player makes no sense.

What I see here is (sadly, again) two groups of developers unwilling to meet halfway and understanding each others problems. Expecting AMD to support a completely separate driver just for Linux is unrealistic. Expecting a 100kLOC code dump do be accepted is unrealistic as well. I don't see anyone talking about how to get over this hurdle on lkml, I just see the single least constructive word: "No."

Meanwhile, 3D support in Linux will remain a crappy tire fire which works well only if you use a completely proprietary nVidia driver.

[tremon]

I've only got one true power as a maintainer, and that is to say No. The other option is I personally sit down and rewrite all the code in an acceptable manner, and merge that instead. But I've discovered I probably don't scale to that level, so again it leaves me with just the one actual power.

-Dave Airlie, in TFA.

[Neliquat]

This position is so self-defeating, I really don't know where to start.

1. There is absolutely value in rejecting bad, or even good but unmaintainable code from your codebase. How is this even an argument?

2. The 'devs' don't just all meet and then decide to blow each other off anyway, AMD is simply in a position with Steam where they want it to "just work" for most games at the lowest investment cost possible. They took a gamble and lost.

3. A updated proprietary driver is not ideal, but works better than making the OS worse. Again, not sure you can really disagree.

[hashhar]

I feel like the LKML is the most hypocritical place I've ever seen. One one hand, we want that more people GNU/Linux which depends on the quality and performance and number of application programs that work on Linux, while on the other we seem to encourage developers to make closed source binary blobs because we keep on showing them that we aren't willing to accept code.

It is a lose-lose situation for a developer. If I write open source software, people will demand more and more from me. If I say, "screw this, I'm just gonna release a blob." they will ridicule me while ignoring the fact that I am releasing the blob only because they pushed me to. /rant