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Open nVidia Linux Driver Pledge Nearly Complete
Ciarán Mooney writes to let us know that the Pledgebank drive to raise $10,000 for Project Nouvaeu is almost complete — at this moment it needs only 196 more people to sign up. Project Nouveau aims to provide open source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards. The drive was started by David Nielsen, whose blog explains what he hopes will happen.
His blog entry says it's basically a $10,000 "thank you" for taking on the project. Seriously, what? I'm giving someone a big pile of cash to thank them for taking on a project, even when they haven't made any meaningful progress toward completion of that project?
I hereby announce I will take on the project of solving world hunger. Please give me a giant no-strings-attached donation as a "thank you" for my initiative. I will then make very little progress toward my goal before finally abandoning it as too difficult.
While I agree with this statement, I think this project is the wrong way to go about it, simply because we do finally have a vendor who has committed to open source driver support: Intel. Now, I will grant you that their cards are slow and crappy but they should be up to the task of accelerating the linux desktop. Also, the current release supports only an integrated video chipset and some older cards... but voting with your dollars is an absolute necessity. For any non-gamer, it should be a sufficiently powerful graphics system, and the G965 Express Chipset supports Core 2 Duo and Pentium D, so you can combine it with very good CPU power. If I were building a system today (aka if I could afford to build a system today) this is the combination I would elect to use.
But most importantly, we need to monetarily support vendors who give us working hardware with working linux drivers, or even vendors who simply give us enough information to write drivers. This is not ATI or nVidia. This apparently is intel. They're also just about the only vendor providing any useful wifi drivers.
If we actually spend money to sponsor driver development this will be a clear message to all graphics card manufacturers that we will put up with their bad behavior.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This shouldn't be that hard to figure out - apparently even the moderators got it this time. See, corporations only feel hits to the wallet. Most of their feedback comes from sales figures, and if they get less love than their competitor (or simply less love than they expect) they hurt, they know something is wrong. Unfortunately, they don't necessarily know why.
However, if ATI or nVidia should lose some market share, they will certainly know that it is not because of their lack of linux support, simply because the OSS community is willing to do the work itself. The proof of this principle is that people are willing to spend money to have someone else do their job for them. Simply buying their products is bad enough, but spending MORE money to support them (they benefit from a driver because it can increase sales) is a clear statement that they don't need to develop open source graphics drivers.
If you really think that this is not on their radar, you are incredibly naive. Linux is the fastest-growing segment in computing, Linux is the only operating system gaining market share in the server space, and Linux is probably the only platform gaining any significant ground in education. Linux will only become more important with time, and Windows less. The change shows every sign of being extremely slow, but that doesn't mean that it's not occurring.
Finally, if it were so unimportant as to not even be on their radar, they wouldn't even have developed their own Linux drivers, closed and crappy as they may be. (Well, nVidia's work pretty well... too bad about ATI.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Often technologies will have in the license agreement "You can't release this code." You aren't required to like it, but if you sign the contract (and this stuff involves real, paper, signed contracts) you are required to respect it. nVidia and ATi both license a good deal of things for their drivers (S3TC would be an example). They can't just give the finger to these people and do what they want, they'll get sued and they'll lose because there's a contract in place.
"isn't patent licensing part of the reason nVidia and Ati won't release fully OSS drivers?"
One of the possible issues is _lack_ of patent licensing. Nobody really knows what trivial and obvious techniques have been patented by some patent-troll, but as long as the patent troll can't prove nvidia are doing something the troll's patent potentially covers, they have no reason to sue or shake nvidia down for license fees. Open source drivers would feed the trolls.
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