[Cooker] Open Sourcing your drivers

[Tim]

We all know that the Nvidia line of video cards are growing in popularity and that they are indeed some of the best cards out on the market. However, I believe you are missing out on a bigger share of sales due to the closed nature of your driver developement. Allowing your drivers to go to the Open Source community would benefit NVidia as much as it would the consumers. Imagine the improvements that could be made upon the drivers at no cost to your company... Bugs would be ironed out, performance increased, and sales would go up. Adopting a closed source policy, not unlike Microsoft's, puts a limit on the growth of your company is a now largely open source arena. Currently, I run Linux Mandrake on my computer and I have a GeForce2 GTS video card that I do like a lot. There was a time however, when I was planning on ditching this GeForce for the sole reason that it was not supported by Linux. With IBM's business machines and workstations switching over to Linux in the next year or so, making open source drivers available could greatly increase the sales of your Quadra line as well. I'm sure many people have contacted you about allowing open source drivers, but I believe that each voice in support of it should be heard. I keep up with the email list from the Linux Mandrake Devel/Beta team and I have seen a large number of emails lately about putting NVidia drivers into the distribution. Alas, this will not be possible until you allow others to view/edit the source code and distribute it freely so as to benefit the users of your product. I would appreciate a response to this email from someone in the company so I know whether or not to look for NVidia products in the future or to warn my clients against them due to the lack of cooperation in helping the customers get the best performance from the product. Hopefully some agreement can be made between us, the users and programmers of open source code, and your terrific company.   Thank you for your time, ------------------------------------------ Tim McKenzie Appalachian State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------   Quoted from NVidia's Website "NVIDIA's mission is to be the most important 3D graphics company in the world. Learn more about our company history, culture, and commitment to community. "   Wouldn't it be great to have the entire open source community standing behind your products and creating a better experience for each and every user? Open Source seems to be the future of programming and the home use of Linux is growing at an astounding pace. Allowing open source NVidia drivers would definately help push the company into the spotlight.