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NVIDIA's Andy Ritger On Linux Drivers
tykev writes "The Director of Unix Software at NVIDIA talks about Linux drivers, planned features, development cycle, and the open source Nouveau driver. (The interview is in English but all the comments are in Czech.) Quoting: 'NVIDIA's stance is to neither help nor hinder Nouveau. We are committed to supporting Linux through a) an open source 2d "nv" X driver which NVIDIA engineers actively maintain and improve, and b) our fully featured proprietary Linux driver which leverages common code with the other platforms that NVIDIA supports.'"
Nouveau probably won't ever be "complete" since there's always new cards to add support for and that sort of thing. If Nouveau gets good enough and is the default driver they will probably start contributing to it. They would save money on driver development, and continuing their proprietary driver would be a bit pointless since everyone would be using Nouveau.
Until Nouveau gets good, I imagine they'll keep pushing the proprietary driver, though.
I experienced a problem with the "nv" driver on my computer with dual 7600GS cards and three displays. It wasn't possible to run all three displays at all with the "nv" driver, but the binary driver from nvidia works. The part that I'm not satisfied with is the need for an alternate driver.
I haven't tried the Nouveau driver, but somebody else may. As I see it, Nvidia should release all information needed to allow others to write suitable drivers. (should apply to all HW manufacturers).
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
seems to me demanding that a company release their drivers in open source
I read & re-read the parent comment, but couldn't see them demanding anything. WTF are you talking about?
I mean, to the exclusion of actually using the software which could make their computer experience better.
Some people have quite pragmatic reasons for preferring open software - particularly kernel software. Driver crashes were one of the things that made windows (particularly in the late 90's / early 2000s) such a mess.
If you're making a hardware purchasing decision and want to run linux, of course you should try to buy from a company that supports FOSS.
Surely we haven't got that many mini-RMSes?
Finish the troll with a flourish. Nice work.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Because it works! There's a saying, 'The squeaky wheel gets the grease.' If Linux users are very vocal about how they expect companies to do business, those companies -will- feel pressured to move more towards that way of doing business.
It's the exact same reason that lobbying a congressman (without money) works. Once they hear it enough, they know it's important to the people that are most important to them: Their customers. (Or voters, as the case may be.)
When people don't tell a company how to behave, you end up with companies like Walmart. Walmart used to be about the country, the consumer, and the profit, in that order. They gave up on the whole 'made in the USA' thing quite a while back. They gave up on customer service even longer ago. They only care about the profit now. They do it by having cheap goods and cheap wages. For people who only care that the goods are cheap, it's a great store. For the rest of us it sucks.
nVidia has the choice of only catering to the mainstream Windows-based gamers, or also adding on a rabidly-loyal group of fanatics that are willing to work for free to make their business better. All nVidia has to do is LISTEN TO THEM and release their drivers open-source.
Yes, there was a great amount of R&D involved in their drivers, but most of the stuff that makes their drivers 'great' on windows just doesn't apply to Linux, like that massive control panel. That doesn't even exist in the binary Linux driver.
The code doesn't have to be GPL or any such. They could release it under their own license that specifically states the code can only be used for a driver for nVidia cards. The only thing necessary is the ability to improve the code at will. (I think they would find it advantageous to go to GPL later, but that's another discussion.)
nVidia really has little reason not to open their source code to the public, unless they are doing something illegal or extremely unethical in their drivers. (Cheating at benchmarks, etc.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM