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Open Source 3D Nvidia Driver Is Ready For Fedora 13
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has already been using the Nouveau X.Org driver in Fedora for providing display and 2D support, but with their next release (Fedora 13) they will be making open-source 3D acceleration readily available to those using Nvidia graphics cards. Red Hat has packaged the Nouveau 3D driver in Fedora 13 and what makes it interesting — besides being an open source 3D driver that was written by the community by reverse engineering Nvidia's closed-source driver — is that it's one of the first drivers to use the Gallium3D driver interface. Phoronix has tested out this Gallium3D driver for Nvidia GPUs in a Fedora 13 daily build and found it to run with a variety of OpenGL games, with benchmarks being included that compare it to Nvidia's official driver. The performance is far from being on the same stage as Nvidia's official Unix driver."
Step 1: Figure things out.
Step 2: Make them work (correctly)
Step 3: Make them work (fast)
its all a part of the process and step 2 is a HUGE achievement especially when most of the information about the chips was reverse engineered.
Because NVIDIA has access to the docs and these guys don't? It's hard work to reverse engineer a video card and build a driver.
clearly your post was a joke, but a serious answer to your question would be Linux Device Drivers: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/ Understanding the linux kernel: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596000028 I found both books fantastic and well worth a read, they will take you from knowing C to developing drivers for the linux kernel.
actually you can get copies of every MS product right back to DOS 3 via technet.
Technet is not a retail channel for typical consumers to get a single product. Also, the older products aren't supported and generally don't work on the new hardware around today.
because some FOSS project is FAR FAR more likely to stop producing updates and go offline (because they got a life/job/girlfriend) then a company like MS or nvidia which has actual funding
NVIDIA has already shown they are willing to drop driver support for their products when they aren't interested anymore. And it's not just about the risk of if they will stop support, you also need to factor in the damage done - we don't have the option to fix the proprietary stuff ourselves even if we wanted to, but we could fix the abandoned FOSS stuff if we considered it worthwhile.
so you'll need use a better example
So you'll need [to] use a better excuse.