On Fri, 6 May 2005, Sean Sullivan wrote:
> Not that it matters to me what video you choose to use, but I do find it > strange that Linux users would choose not to give their hardware money > to the companies that actually care about the open source community and > provide up-to-date drivers that work very well for the latest of > hardware. I want the best possible support for my OS so my money goes to > the companies that work hard to give me that support. Im not much of a > gamer, but I still bought UT2003, 04, and Doom3 so these companies > would see that we WILL buy games if they are produced. > > Just my 2 cents... Yeah I tend to agree. Much as I like the philosophy of Free Software (I am a member of the FSF), I don't really care that nVidia has closed-source video drivers, because (1) it doesn't harm the free software community: it is a driver for a particular piece of hardware, it doesn't have issues with vendor lock-in or proprietary data formats that other software does. nVidia seem to do a pretty good job of maintaining the driver; if it was open sourced, they might not bother doing that and instead rely on 'the community' to maintain it. (2) open-sourcing it wouldn't be much benefit to the free software community: Well *maybe* it would be of assistance in developing drivers for other video cards, I actually have no idea how chipset-specific these things are. But I guess it cannot be that much help, otherwise it would be equally easy to port the open-source 3D ATI drivers to nVidia cards... In a purely technical sense, closed-source drivers are wasteful and nVidia, ATI etc would be better off open-sourcing everything and then collaborating on software drivers. But the way graphics hardware business works at the moment that is simply unrealistic - you could make the same argument about their hardware designs too and I havn't seen anyone advocating open source hardware on this forum. So the choice is between a company that releases crap drivers with poor support, or a company that releases high quality drivers, or sitting on the sidelines watching the world go by in 2D. Cheers, Ian McCulloch -- [email protected] mailing list
