NVIDIA Is Joining the Linux Foundation

Norsefire writes "NVIDIA is joining the Linux Foundation, along with three other to-be-announced companies. From the article: 'As one of the three big makers of graphics chips for PCs--the other two are Intel and AMD, both of which are longtime Linux Foundation members--Nvidia's increased participation in Linux could be big news for users of the free and open source operating system. Nvidia has long taken a closed approach to Linux drivers for its graphics cards, offering only a proprietary one and declining to participate in the open source Nouveau driver project, which has depended instead on reverse engineering.'"

Comments

Re:the secret about what makes them tick

[hairyfeet]

"But, having given it out as GPL, they now get access to a million geeks who will do free support and bugfixing on the code."

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!...oh wait, you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA owww, my sides...ohh thanks, that's the hardest I've laughed in ages! Because Linux is known for having rock solid drivers that never break, snort, snicker guffaw! lets face it friend, your driver model is shit. its always been shit, and as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse it will always BE shit, why? Because he likes it that way and because he knows that SEVER companies, which is where he makes his money, will jump through his hoops so he don't have to give a crap. this is ignoring the fact that every. other. major. OS on the ENTIRE planet has a driver ABI, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2. Is Linus THAT arrogant, that he thinks he's smarter than EVERY OS designer on the planet? yep. Eeeeegggoo come and it won't go away. Mark my words 3 weeks after Torvalds drops dead there WILL be an ABI and it'll be hailed as the second coming, Well unless the replacement for Linus is a follower of the great smelly one in which case they will continue with the already disproved RELIGIOUS argument against ABIs (the ONLY one I've seen provided BTW, kinda funny that an OS would have a religious movement whose job it is to maintain "purity") which is of course "ZOMFG they might provide a...gasp, shock horror...binary blob ZOMFG!" which of course ignores that the number one GPU for Linux and the most used driver in Linux is Nvidia drivers which are....survey says....binary blobs!

You want to know why hardware manufacturers ignore you THIS is why. With just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers you can support Windows for more than 20 years, no more work required, you just need a 2K/XP/2K3 32 bit, XP X64/2k3 X64, WinVista/7/8 32bit,WinVista/7/8 64bit, and tada! you've just covered EVERY use case for your product on Windows, even the non popular and server editions. With Linux you either pay a team of driver developers to constantly update the things when Torvalds breaks them yet again, or you leave your company to the not so tender mercy of some "hacker dude" you have ZERO control over who may or may not make a decent driver out of what you give him. See AMD hiring driver guys to help the Open Source guys for an example of how that can cost you money for zero gain.

So waste your mod points, crawl back into your perception bubbles going "La la la, everything is beautiful, la la la!" but the honest ones will know I'm right. Linux has suffered from the "busted shitter" problem for years and frankly it isn't getting any better in that regard. what are the busted shitters? its the REALLY hard, thankless, shitty, long hours,crappy jobs that never get done because nobody is willing to waste years of their lives on them for free. trying to have a really functional driver model WITHOUT having ABIs is one of those busted shitter problems which is why others like BSD and Solaris adopted ABIs. But there are many busted shitters in Linux, the lousy documentation, lack of QA and regression testing, upgrades breaking bog standard hardware because of lack of oversight, hell remember when Linux USED to laugh about Windows having to install clean to upgrade? Don't laugh about that now that all the distros tell you to do the same thing huh? that's the busted shitter problem in a nutshell.

IMHO the sad part is things didn't have to be this way, the community could accept the busted shitter problem and work to route around the damage. tell Torvalds it ain't 1993 anymore and to either come up with a way to magically fix the driver issues or STFU and give you an ABI, take up collections to offer bounties for really nasty busted shitters like upgrades breaking bog standard hardware or lack of docs, but instead its a giant perception bubblepaloza, where everyone trips over themselves to talk about how "leet" they are and just can't seem to understand why after 20 years Linux is still lower than the margin for error on the desktop. I mean you