More details about AMD’s promises soon

At the Red Hat summit AMD’s Henri Richard said that AMD will fix the ATI driver problems with Open Source. According to German technology news heise.de details will be given soon.

Christoph Blizzard mentioned in a short blog post from the summit a statement made by AMD’s Executive Vice President (paraphrased):

“most people are worried about what they will lose…IP, etc…we’re worried about what we can win.” They know it’s a problem and they are committed to fixing

The German news site heise.de immediately asked Henri Richard about further details, but he responded (German) that he will not talk about more concrete plans. However, “shortly” there will be a announcement after the last technical and juridical things are sorted out.

That reminds me of an interview with AMD’s head of software development where he stated that non-core parts of the drivers like the installation routine or additional scripts might be released as Open Source. Also, for some cards the 2D part is already Open Source.

I would be (positively) surprised if they release the core parts of the driver as Open Source. However, we might see Open Source 2D drivers like it has already been before for older cards. Also, stuff like TV-Out or the control center could be released as Open Source because they do not content “high value IP” like the 3D parts.
On the other side it could also be possible that AMD tries to copy Intel’s WLAN driver attempt: releasing all parts necessary to build the kernel modules plus providing a binary blob which is independent from changes in the kernel API. Of course current AMD cards do not come along with the need of a firmware image, but the principle of splitting up into Open Source and binary blob still might be possible.

But we will see “shortly”, to use AMD’s words.

State of (common) search bars in KDE

In the discussions around the last commit digest the question if there will be a common, firefox-like search bar for all applications anytime soon which all applications can share. It will not make it into KDE 4 for certain reasons, but might be a possibility for KDE 4.1.

The question about the common search bar was raised by me because the current commit digest issue 57 featured a screenshot of the current state of the firefox-like search bar in kate:

The problem with this search bar is that it is kate only: the code is in kate’s files, and not shared with other applications.
Other applications also implemented them by their own: konsole, okkular and konversation. Additionally, there is a very strong user request to add something like that to konqueror as well.

So you might think that this is rather dull because it is duplication of efforts – the code for the standard search field (ctrl+f) is in kdelibs to be shared among applicaitons, after all!
However, when I raised these concerns it turned out it is not that easy:

Pino Toscano:
As Robert pointed out already, it’s not really easy to do that. Every search bar relies on specific stuff of the application, thus reducing the potential sharing to just a simple widget.

superstoned:
I find it odd that there is so little code to share – the ctrl-F dialog is in KDElibs, right?

Robert Knight:
Yes. The search bar however is not a dialog, so managing it is different. The find dialog itself doesn’t actually do very much either.
It requires changes to both kdelibs and the applications, the search bar is not quite a drop-in replacement.

Since kdelibs is now frozen, we will certainly not see such changes in kdelibs before KDE 4.1. But since the developers are aware of the topic, we might hope for such a solution. And honestly, to me it looks like that we have to wait until that to see a new search implemented in konqueror, which is sad somehow.