alex bustamante wrote:
How many manufactures release their drivers in open source? Does Matrox do it?
No. In fact, Matrox was one of the pioneers in the concept of binary-only driver stubs with open-source interfaces (Matrox calls it HAL/hallib), which is now a pretty common way of providing closed source drivers for open source operating systems.
Getting complete open-source drivers for consumer hardware in highly competitive markets is more or less a question of good relations between open-source developers (or their employers) and hardware manufacturers - the money Joe Users spend on hardware for their FreeBSD PCs does not influence the support politics of manufacturers one bit.
The ati drivers with hardware 3d acceleration support which are found in XFree86/Xorg (userland part) FreeBSD/Linux (kernel DRI support) show that complete open source support can happen, but also are nice examples how such support can be very quickly discontinued once the market takes a turn.
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