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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.
One big problem in not releasing the source code is that they actually are not making our computer experience better: their drivers have bugs, and we will be locked to whatever features and bugs THEY want to make available to us -- so, basically we become hostages of their will, they can do whatever they want, because whithout THEIR driver, your nvidia card isn't worth its weight.
In the future, when new versions and extensions of OpenGL are released, we won't have any guarantee that they will properly update the drivers. So, you'll probably won't be able to use their proprietary drivers in 5 years for new applications (shining new wobbling effects), because these apps will need new extensions, but the driver for your specific nvidia card is arbitrarily not supported anymore by them (they want to force you to throw the old one away). Too bad for you.
On the other side, if we have access to the source code (or at least the hardware specification), we don't even need nvidia's help: we can do the updates/bug-squatting ourselves, much better than a small team at nvidia. This is something that these companies don't get: the whole world is willing to write their drivers for free and maintain them to the end of times, but they refuse the consumer this right (or maybe they get, they just want you to throw away your old card and buy a new one). We don't want a huge amount of work from them, quite the contrary! It's *way* cheaper for them to release an open-source driver: it costs nada/zero, we can build one with the bare bones of a reasonable hardware specification, a little pdf file -- how much does it cost to post a pdf file on the Internet?
There's no RMS ideology in that, only the absolute minimum someone would expect in terms of support for something you bought. Nowadays, the choice is clear: go Intel X3000/X3500, which supports open source and you can be sure will always be up-to-date. Ignore nvidia and ati, until at least one day (I hope so) nouveau arrives.
What you say is confusing and has the smell of a well crafted lie. Can you set me straight so I can understand why Nvidia is unable to do like Intel and fully co-operate with the free software community?
Have a look at NVidia's OpenGL specifications web-page
Every extensions comes with an IP Status field. For example ARB_color_buffer_float has the following:
IP Status
SGI owns US Patent #6,650,327, issued November 18, 2003. SGI
believes this patent contains necessary IP for graphics systems
implementing floating point (FP) rasterization and FP framebuffer
capabilities.
SGI will not grant the ARB royalty-free use of this IP for use in
OpenGL, but will discuss licensing on RAND terms, on an individual
basis with companies wishing to use this IP in the context of
conformant OpenGL implementations. SGI does not plan to make any
special exemption for open source implementations.
Contact Doug Crisman at SGI Legal for the complete IP disclosure.
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