Justas Ingelevičius wrote in about an Autodesk international user group poll about non-Windows ports. Specifically, users want Autodesk Revit (engineering design software) to run on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. As Justas writes:
We have to handle projects sometimes ~1GB of size (whole districts with
20 levels buildings completely 3D) in Autodesk Revit Architecture and
let edit that project for many users on network. Work speed depends on
effective management of computer and network resources. It definitely
will run better on Linux, then on Vista or Xp. We invest much in good
hardware and high speed LAN and it’s ridiculous, that we have to run
windows…
In other words, the interesting question is not “Would you pay for proprietary software?” or “Can proprietary software exist with free operating systems?” but “Your software is the only thing keeping us on Windows; can you sell us what we really want to buy?” It’s easy to predict that this conversation will happen more frequently and with greater volume. (I imagine something similar happened when Windows NT was worth using and much, much cheaper than high-end UNIX workstations.)
Original post by chromatic
AMD has recently released register specifications for the ATI Radeon R5xx and R6xx graphic devices. Engineers from Novell have now released a first alpha quality Open Source driver which currently supports initial mode settings. Next steps are adding support for more hardware, RandR 1.2 support, video overlay support and 2D acceleration.
