* Uwe Hermann uwe@hermann-uwe.de [060901 00:11]:
Ideally, both. I guess the corporate contributors will continue to (mainly) support boards they have use-cases for (which makes sense from an economical point of view).
For cheap, old, or mainstream boards you can buy in your favorite computer shop, ebay etc. random interested contributors/coders are important, IMHO. Given enough such contributors and enough popularity of the project among hacker-type Free Software users/programmers it won't take too long to have support for a good bunch of popular boards.
time is playing with us. The north and south bridges that are expensive, fast and modern today will be old and cheap tomorrow, so when K8 et al see a successor, we might automatically our potential userbase might automatically become broader.
Notice that at the moment on K8 all server chipsets are supported but none of the consumer chipsets (Via, ATI, some NVidia hw).
ACK. Although I don't think putting effort into "the latest and greatest" is a problem, it's just that the older stuff should be worked on, too.
In the old Amiga games scene there is a concept called abandonware. If the technology does not make a "unique selling point" for the vendor anymore, it is released to the public for the sake of the community.
Is this a concept that hw vendors on this list could life with?
Regards, Stefan