Hi folks. Here's an update on the petition:
As we will reach 3.000 (!!) signatures in the next hours (it's up for only 7 days!), our petition is currently ranked 8th in the Top 10 Most Active Petitions at petitiononline.com.
It is important to notice that this is the only petition concerning an IT issue, among hundreds at that site, to be placed at such a position. More popular petitions involve mostly humanitarian and environmental claims.
I guess at this point we can say that, no matter how many more signatures we get, there clearly is a very significant dissatisfaction by VIA Linux users. A lot of people agree with what we're saying. We were right on starting all this.
I am being strongly criticized, at my personal email address, by a reduced group of Free Software fundamentalists ("we don't care about a working driver, VIA has to release full specs or I am never gonna buy it anymore" or "start a new petition asking VIA to end it's operations"), BSD users ("I will never sign a petition where the word Linux is written") and such.
I would like everyone to understand one thing: I am gonna stick to what is written in the petition. You can all be sure that I would be extremely happy to see VIA release full specs under a public license and also help the community to develop good drivers. However, my first concern is with the average users, who really don't know or don't care what GPL, MIT, etc licenses are, but they have paid for the hardware and deserve working drivers.
I am gonna do my best to give the community the best possible solution. However, I am not gonna engage in fundamentalists flame wars, battles between different Open Source projects ideals and such. Users don't need politics now: Users need drivers.
I want to discuss with VIA *any* way to make VIA hardware work decently on Linux.
Regards,
Effenberg
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