On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 16:15:27 -0700, Levi Sorenson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Does anyone have opinions about the future of video drivers for Linux? > > -Levi Sorenson
I have one. Vendors are unlikely to open their video drivers. A good portion of a video card manufacturers design secrets exist within the driver. Heck some vendors (ATI and nVidia) have specific code in their drivers so they perform faster (sloppier) on popular 3D benchmarking software. If they open the source to their drivers A) Their competitors will understand more about their hardware architechture (aka trade secret) and B) They will be exposed as the cheating dogs they are (or remove the performance cheating code and look really bad in benchmarks). I'm all for open-source but I don't know how I feel about this situation. On one hand you have OSS advocates saying "Open your drivers! We want your code to be supported in the standard Linux kernel. And we'd like to compile your driver for non-PC systems, thank you very much. What's that? It might affect your profit margins and competitive edge in the market? Well you should have thought about that before becoming an **EViL** profit motivated corporation." And on the other hand you have VGA card makers saying, "Ya. Linux is cool and we really want to support it, but I don't want to open our secret driver code and have our technology ripped off by nvidia.com.tw." Noice the Tiwan extention. I think nVidia's Linux drivers have found a good balance, but I think it's rediculous that you MUST have a full GCC development environment on your PC to update your drivers (granted they do pre-compile for *some* platforms about 8 years after they release a driver). But according to Linus, RMS, and others, nVidia might as well be Satan for not giving their driver away. I just want UT2004 to look pimp on Linux... nVidia's drivers make this so. -Brayn .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
