> Tim wrote:
> 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.
There was an email from NVidia published in the most recent Linux Weekly News
(http://lwn.net/) about this. Apparently, the parts of the driver not covered by
NDAs _are_ open source, but it doesn't amount to very much of the drivers.
They also mention that while the drivers must remain closed because of those
NDAs, and the vast majority of the driver code is shared between XFree86 4 and
Windows, NVidia are doing extra stuff for Linux. And that at least one of their
prominent critics has a vested interest.
If you wanted to do an OSS NVidia driver, there is one for XFree86 3.3.6 to
start you off. It lacks direct rendering, however. I understand that there is
also an OSS 2D-only NVidia driver for XFree86 4.0*.
--
"There's even a page about it on the web; I don't know the address,
you know, the slash-slash thing, but I'm sure our techie viewers out
there can find out... Ha, ha..." -- actual quote from PBS pledge break
