> Fine. Go and do it, instead of complaining about it. I'm sure you'll check the IP and find that actually I'm not Danial/Dmitri/whatever, but please, take a step back before writing this sort of thing.
It really does make me question whether I want to use anything from projects with this attitude. Quite independantly of whether any payment is made, out here I feel like a customer of operating system producers. The major cost to me of an OS on a PC is my time, not the rather trivial amount of cash involved. To me, its a customer/ vendor relationship. So please, don't respond to customer/user suggestions that way, unless you want to be treated like an amateur having a play to see what you can do. I didn't think that *was* what you wanted. Do you want a user community? You need to respect users who have no intention of developing your system. They might have enough on their plate solving their own development problems. As it happens, I agree with the original post: if you are too small to define de facto standards, and there is no de jure standard to hide behind (not that they always matter that much in reality) then practicality says that its necessary to go with the flow and find a way to use whatever is there, and if that's an NVidia blob for Solaris or Mac or even Windows, then so be it. In the particular case of graphics drivers, its very much more attractive to target a system which can also be the desktop of choice. Maybe second best would be decent Xen guest support, but it surely must be a distant second. I can see that in a security oriented appliance there may be a good case against using a blob for verifiability, but for a desktop developer environment? The arguments against in that case look like sour grapes about the perceived inconvenience. I don't have access to the guts of the Triarch and Tibco libraries we use, nor the Sybase and Oracle clients, and it doesn't stop me from doing my job. James
