gabriel wrote: >> This point is going to take a long while to resolve, and the ball is >> entirely in Linus's camp. For political reasons, allowing hw >> manufacturers to create binary only drivers has been made difficult, >> or at least allowed to remain difficult. > > it's not that they're trying to keep the process "difficult". it's > that they want the drivers to be free (as in freedom AND beer) -- and > i support this thinking.
In an ideal world yes, but I cannot expect a competitive hardware manufacturer to be fully open with its drivers. as any windows gamer will tell you, drivers make a world of difference and it wouldn't be in a companies best interests to allow a competitor to see how their drivers achieve its performance. You should be jumping up and down with glee at the level of support Nvidia are providing to a such a teeny minority of its customers. your damned if you do and damned if you don't. > now i can understand (barely) that a corporation like ati, nvidia > etc. might not want to Free their driver code, but what i can't > understand is why they say that they "are behind linux" and then > don't contribute either financially or technically to any of the > projects attempting to develop drivers for their hardware. Nvidia can say they are behind Linux, they do provide an excellent binary driver & installer. if other companies followed it would make a lot of lives much simpler (as oppose to just providing a pre compiled module and some cryptic YMMV destructions on how to use it) Why should nvidia support projects to duplicate their drivers? They provide an excellent & regularly updated driver that's written & maintained by people that know the hardware inside out. It makes sense that the best people to support Nvidia are Nvidia. An open project would simply be so much wasted effort when there are so many areas of Linux that are in greater need of attention. Making the kernel as binary driver friendly as windows would be a great place to start and IMO would allow Linux to make massive in-roads into windows desktop territory. It would allow users to focus on actually using Linux rather than getting it working in the first place, and make it accessible to the vast majority of people who simply just don't care how or why anything works, just so long as it does. Rick Kitty5 NewMedia http://Kitty5.com POV-Ray News & Resources http://Povray.co.uk TEL : +44 (01270) 501101 - ICQ : 15776037 PGP Public Key http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x231E1CEA -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
