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That's fair, but there's another way to look at it: Mesa and Gallium are MIT licensed, why are they rolling their own inferior solution when they can "steal" a

That's fair, but there's another way to look at it: Mesa and Gallium are MIT licensed, why are they rolling their own inferior solution when they can "steal" a better one? You'd think if your company's bottom line was built even partially on its software, the phrases "permissively licensed" and "better than we can do" alone would be enough to get the (glx)gears turning. Why did a single hobbyist make a smarter technical decision than a team of professionals? EDIT: From yet another perspective, maybe rolling your own crappy driver infrastructure and OpenGL implementation that only you and your colleagues understand is the smartest decision of all.

deleted 13y ago
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Jasper_ 13y ago
This is just speculation, but my biggest guess open-source moves fast, and you have two choices: keep up with upstream, release your code and let the mesa community maintain it, or maintain a years-old fork internally. Building your own might sound like a great idea when you first start out: you can fix any bugs you want without having to trudge through the giant amount of open-source code and keep up with all the architecture changes since. Also, sometimes companies make dumb decisions. The fact that Mali and Qualcomm share some code smells to me like they've licensed a GL implementation from a third-party, which could be a reason why we aren't seeing any bug fixes: they don't have the source code to their own GL implementation.