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Hi Ray, I would like to say that I completely agree with your view that 'The Emperor Has No Clothes'. About a year ago, if I got that right, I was very excited about the project and wanted to help actively. So I put forward that we needed a 'vision', a.k.a. 'elevator pitch', a concise description of the problem, the solution, and the strategies to make it a reality. This created a slightly heated discussion, ranging from "we already know exactly what we want and how we're going to do it", to "I need features XYZ as well" and "only solution ABC will work". So clearly nobody really knew what the project was about and it had already attracted a lot of people with big wishes and the wrong ideas. A vision statement appeared on the Wiki but it's more like a solution in search of a problem. Frankly, the situation hasn't improved much. In fact, one of the fundamental questions raised a year ago still exists: Do we really need open-source hardware to solve the actual problem? As you have indicated as well, it is very much a software problem. Hardware can solve ONLY the performance aspect of the problem but that's just a fraction of the work (not underestimating the complexity of hardware design). What we need (first) is a complete software infrastructure, from high level GUI API to 2D/3D API, to O.S. interface, to kernel, to driver, to device emulator. I'm a software rendering nut, with experience in embedded devices, and I'm convinced that a good emulator and all the layer of software on top of it would already make a huge difference with today's situation, completely solving the problem of not having open-source drivers. The only issue remaining is performance. But CPU's are getting faster by the day and GUI work isn't that computationally expensive anyway, so emulation is acceptable and it's the fastest way to get the application programmers started. The hardware can follow later, which will be much easier to design because at that point we know exactly what it needs to be capable of. Like you said, OpenGL is more than we need and less than we need. Does this mean we have to freeze the hardware aspect of OGP and all start coding? I believe not, but we have to realize that the hardware itself, no matter how powerful, is not a solution on its own. Best regards, Nicolas Capens -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: open-graphics-bounces@duskglow.com [mailto:open-graphics-bounces@duskglow.com] Namens Ray Heasman Verzonden: Saturday, May 13, 2006 19:13 Aan: Timothy Miller CC: Open-graphics Onderwerp: Re: [Open-graphics] The Emperor Has No Clothes. I will reply with more in this particular thread later, but I want to make it clear that I am not saying I have a better idea. I'm saying I have serious doubts about the way things are going. I'm saying "The Emperor has no clothes", not "I have the Emperor's clothes". I'm not trying to just dump on the whole project, but I am extremely dubious about the direction things are going in and I am trying to explain why there is a problem. I am trying to air dirty laundry and make everyone re-evaluate where we are. One of my points is that I think the current target is simultaneously too similar to the other stuff out there and too complicated to be a good first project. Complexity is a cost, not a feature. I do have an idea. It's weird and purposely "out there". I'm not going to bring it up now, because I'm not claiming that it's the answer to OGP's problems. I don't want a discussion of my idea right now, but a discussion of where OGP is today. I WILL put forward my idea later, but please bear in mind that I am not claiming it as a solution. It's just "different", and I hope that it might interest people more than a copy of everything else out there. I only started bringing it up, because I had to reply to your comments about 3D pipelines. I'll be replying to the other emails in this thread shortly. Cheers, Ray _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list Open-graphics@duskglow.com http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list Open-graphics@duskglow.com http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
