I'm in a quandry- perhaps someone reading this entry can offer advice... Several individuals, myself included, are attempting to make DRI drivers for the ATI RagePRO chipset. Of them, I think I am the only one with the information to make it happen, and while I'm not under an NDA, per se, I have not been given permission to grant access to the technical data. ATI is being bull-headed where once they were nice to us- they're not giving any further access to the tech data to anyone that doesn't already have it. So, what do I do? Worse, I find out that XFree86, Inc. has made several NDA deals to get the information needed to make their drivers possible- and you have to have submitted several patches or something similar to be admitted as a member of the XFree86 project.

I find this to be more than mildly disturbing. It turns the project into nothing more than a free ride for the hardware vendors- they get drivers that they would have to do themselves (which they wouldn't have- they only have budget for Windows) and reap the benefits of the free labor.

Again, what do I do? Do I put the gory details of this up on Advogato, LinuxToday, or Slashdot? I don't know for sure- my gut level instincts is to let someone know all of the goings on for what they are; but I don't want to start another stupid flame-fest like the recent blowups with the GNOME and KDE teams.