September 9th, 2008
Harald Welte gets a black eye
When Harald Welte was hired recently as open source liaison at VIA Technologies, the Taiwanese chip maker, I rejoiced.
Now I’m feeling used, and wondering if he hasn’t been used as well.
One of Welte’s first projects was to release source code for one of VIA’s most popular chip sets, the 2D Xorg.
Only it turns out the code that was released is pretty useless. There’s no 3-D acceleration, which developers are used to. There’s not even any TV-out functionality.
On his own blog Welte explains that many features were not owned by VIA, but third-party developers who refused to release them. Or allow them to be documented.
VIA isn’t even building a community around the new code, basic things like mailing lists and a public revision control system.
Here’s what his blog says:
Not because VIA doesn’t believe in the community, but rather because the disclose of VIA’s source now enables everyone involved to look at all the available drivers. Some consensus has to be found on which driver is best to be used as a base for a future Xorg mainline driver, and then the community and VIA can work together on merging bits from other drivers into that base. Creating VIA’s own mailing lists (and community) would lead to more fragmentation, rather than unification.
Huh?
Welte is hinting that VIA might walk down the path that open source developers point out, but there’s no guarantee of that. Developers who worked with VIA in this way would be buying a pig in a poke, and trusting Welte’s word it will all work out.
Which he admits he really can’t give.
What it sounds like to me is that VIA gave this guy a job he couldn’t do so they could show their proprietary partners it couldn’t be done. I’ve been there before, and I sympathize.
But it doesn’t give me warm or fuzzy feelings.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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