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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.'"
Hedging my bets on Apple, Microsoft and McDonalds.
From the first article:
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The summary implies that the submitter thinks this is going to improve things with respect to their graphics drivers. Come on. Not likely. They're doing this as an ARM manufacturer, NOT as a GPU manufacturer.
I understand the sentiment. I became much less of a fan when nVidia did that.
I once read where nVidia actually contracted the creation of drivers for the nVidia graphics chips to some outside company and their agreement with them prevents them from doing open source drivers which competes with the closed source drivers and that their inside knowledge of the software drivers would be used against nVidia if/when they are sued for their participation in the creation of open source drivers.
There are probably patents and all manner of things "legal" in their way. If this were indeed the case, it still doesn't make be feel better about nVidia since they demonstrated not only poor judgement, but has written off F/OSS rather quickly without much consideration or foresight.
As for graphics, I'm under the impression that ATI/AMD graphics cards still rely on OSS drivers, that those drivers have historically performed miserably, and that ATI/AMD has never made an attempt to make them better.
Meanwhile, nvidia's released (proprietary) drivers for X for at least a decade. I just hope this isn't nvidia's way of distancing themselves from supporting X...mylaptop depends on their X driver!
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
As Theo de Raadt says, probably the most important part is providing open documentation, so that it is easier to write the drivers.
To me the news sounds too good to be true...
Will ARMnix become the new Wintel?
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
Does that mean that the Linux commodities finally got tweak the Nvidia drivers to the point that they can get to squeeze the last drop of performance out of Nvidia graphic chips?
If yes, welcome to the Linux Foundation
If no, then what's the meaning of joining?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Posting anonymously, as I was deeply involved with the OSDL. I attended a number of their high-level meetings as I work in the IT industry and was asked to contribute. What I saw was a lot of Powerpoint among CxO types who talked about being the "center of gravity" in the Linux world. Most were guys who just wanted a cheaper operating system so they could get rid of proprietary Unix...not much love for the cost of Solaris + Veritas in those rooms. They were all eager to get a free-as-in-beer OS that would save them millions a year.
The OSDL had zero ability to get RedHat, etc. to modify their plans. RedHat is very enterprise-friendly, but that's from directly working with their customers, not through OSDL.
Anyway, funding dried up and that was that.
Wikipedia says the LF has "narrowing their respective focuses to that of promoting Linux in competition with Windows". Well, good luck with that. Jumping from an enterprise focus (OSDL) to a consumer focus (LF) would pretty tough for people who have their act together...and the OSDL crowd never did. After a couple years I found myself asking "what is the point of all this? we talk and look at powerpoint, but I don't see any actual change coming out of this organization," and so I left.
1. RTFA.
2. It does not mean any of that.
3. It means that they're pumping money into Linux. For what means... speculation includes the Tegra platform (which really is not a bad speculation at all), but who knows. You also have Oracle, Adobe, etc. in that list that have little to no support for Linux with their software (or other questionable attributes).
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
I don't think they will ever open-source their drivers. It would be embarrassing for them when others discuss their code, they are protective of their work, etc. All you can hope for, and what you should be demanding, is that they give more specs to the nouveau team.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
The binary driver as such is fine, but the nvidia screen configuration tool sucks big time and for non-experts users is unusable for every-day tasks like dual screen setup, up to hosing your whole GUI. It desperately needs integration into the X facilities via the GUI tools provided by the desktop environments.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
It means that they meet the requirements for membership* and have paid their membership fees. Which basically means they're throwing a bunch of money into a pool intended to promote, support, improve, and defend Linux and other OSS projects and developers. And getting a tax credit.
Does that mean [other stuff]?
No.
If no, then what's the meaning of joining?
It means that they've thrown a bunch of money into a pool intended to...blah, blah. And gotten a tax credit. And the right to say "Member of the Linux Foundation" on their website and other promotional materials.
* Membership is open to "...individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies." (Emphasis mine.) Note that you don't even have to engage in the use of Linux--you merely have to support it (whatever that means).
Not as long as there are ex-SGI people in the place that can tell their stories about the insane amount of time wasted in court over graphics software patents. So long as the patent trolls have to do some work to determine what Nvidia have they are a little bit safer from them.
It's just another insane direct consequence of software patents.
Nvidia's consistent support for near flawless video drivers is why I won't even consider anyone else. I wouldn't even be using linux if it weren't for them. I can't think of another computer company that has so ensured my product loyalty.
The Tegra platforms have not gotten a lot of traction in the Linux kernel development world, generally because they put all their GPIOs in the wrong place for udev and want to put all of their board-specific GPIO renaming in #ifdef's rather than putting them in separate platform description files.
This is particularly egregious for things like the auido jacks, which due to poor code arrangement, never end up sending udev events to subsystem audio, and instead send them to platform.
I would be very happy if the only thing that came out of it was that the names they assigned to pins in the source code matched the names that they have on their technical specifications instead of having weird-ass names for everything. Right now you have to translate through three layers of indirection to figure out what you have to poke to pull a pin high.
Really, what the ARM folks need to do is get together and decide on an ISA like the Intel/AMD/IBM/yada-yada folks did so that as engineers it posible to target a single real platform. Yes, I realize that would tend to commoditize them, but they are already budge also-ran chips.
-- Terry
You also have Oracle ... in that list that have little to no support for Linux with their software (or other questionable attributes).
Oracle? I mean sure Larry's O-monster is definitely one of the major Big Evil Corporations(tm), but you can't say they have no support for Linux. Hell, the flagship product Oracle Database has been available for Linux (and even certified on several distros) for at least 10 years now -- I was running 8i on a Slackware box back in 2003!
Many years ago, they came out with their own Linux distro (based on RHEL), and now you can even get a turn-key solution that includes an "appliance" server, which runs their software ... get this ... on Linux! They will fully support you with mission-critical issues, as long as you pay for the support contract ;)
Furthermore, most people don't even know that Oracle has dedicated team of paid staff that does nothing but work on FOSS. One of these projects is OCFS2, which I have personally been involved with (as a user & community member, not a developer) for 2-3 years now and has recently become part of the mainline Linux kernel.
They were the only ones who made a GPU driver that actually both worked and performed well. Whether or not it's open source is of secondary consideration - give me a fucking GPU driver that actually pumps pixels!
Oracle and Adobe may not have been the best/most interesting examples. (I think the fact that Oracle has an extremely pricey "Platinum Membership", representing a half-million dollar investment, says all that needs to be said about that. They're clearly pretty serious about Linux, whatever the Linux or Slashdot community may think of them.)
Some really surprising names (at the Gold/100k USD level) are Nokia and Sony. They've invested as much as SUSE (the only pure-Linux player at the gold level) and Google. Of course, Sony is a big company, and just because their games division seems to hate Linux, that doesn't mean that the company overall isn't a huge user/supporter. As for Nokia...I got nuthin'.... :)
Toyota is also a Gold Member, which is not as shocking as seeing Nokia or Sony on the list, but I still find it a little surprising that they're willing to sink six figures into general Linux support/promotion/defense. I had no idea they even used it. I certainly don't expect them to open-source their drivers. [Insert car analogy here.] :)
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
I don't think they will ever open-source their drivers. It would be embarrassing for them when others discuss their code, they are protective of their work, etc. All you can hope for, and what you should be demanding, is that they give more specs to the nouveau team.
Of course that is all that the community wants. Why should NVidia have all the fun of writing kick-butt driver code? :-p
I guess NVidia must be getting awfully close to taking that step. I would say, just waiting for a suitably high profile occasion to announce it now. Stranger than fiction: they have some strong OSS advocates on the inside.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Right now I have 28 very nice Nvidia GPU's ticking away computing determinants of large matrices for me -- and this is just to estimate how much computer time I will need for the real calculation, which will use on the order of 100K GPU-hours. The high-performance computing crowd is switching from conventional supercomputers to Nvidia GPU's as fast as the code can be written.
These things ain't cheap: the new ones that they're putting into clusters cost $1.5k each, and I bet the profit margin on them is a lot bigger than on Geforce 555M's. More importantly this is an avenue for Nvidia to dominate the high-performance computing market, especially if they do things like implement a way for a GPU on one node to talk to a GPU on another node (by a direct-to-Infiniband link or something), bypassing the PCI Express busses. (Right now it's GPU -> PCI Express -> RAM -> Infiniband -> RAM -> PCI Express -> GPU.)
Needless to say the overwhelming majority of these machines run Linux. (Your average physicist can't even imagine what a Windows supercomputer would look like. I sure can't.)
You can't be serious? Look at the OP's UID. These guys practically invented Slashdot's "Never RTFA" rule.
1. RTFA
You can't be serious? Look at the OP's UID. These guys practically invented Slashdot's "Never RTFA" rule
tl;dr
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Because a sysadmin was allowed to pick technology and ensure job security for as long as they wanted. Smart admin, dumb company.
Well if Mint is actually spending money to try to offer a better product then i humbly apologize, its not CntOS which is just stripping out the copyrighted material in a product they USED to pay for and handing it out to their customers. That doesn't change the fact that for all the community's big talk of "Support us and we'll support you!" that CentOS is now on 2/3rds of the servers out there, just proving that communism is a giant failwhale and that greed wins out in the end. Because there is NO company that gives more back than RH, yet the very same community they give to then rip them as much as they possibly can. and look at Canonical? how many millions did Shuttleworth sink into trying to give a Linux that worked for the masses? in the end they'll have to close their doors and join the ranks of Xandros, linspire, gOS, novell, in the "We were never able to make a penny" group.
In the end I think it comes down to a complete failure of ideology, in that its been proven time and time again communism doesn't work and that's what RMS wants with the GPL, a communist utopia. the ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is because MSFT has a truly byzantine licensing schema and truly insane prices for server OSes which makes it easy for a company like Red hat to sell their product because when you have a thousand servers its cheaper to pay for Red hat support than it is to pay for MSFT licenses. But this is also why it will NEVER work on the desktop, because the desktop suffers from what I call the "busted shitters" problem which is also a problem the communists had, going so far as to have to order soldiers on 'potato duty" to get the lousy jobs done.
You see in servers a company has a problem, problem costs company money, so they pay to fix the problem. in desktops because anybody can copy what you've done there simply isn't any money to be made fixing problems as Canonical is finding out and when you rely on volunteers the busted shitters simply don't get done. its simply human nature, everyone wants to be the artist, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitter. Now there are some seriously busted shitters in Linux on the desktop that anybody but a zealot would be willing to admit is true, just a few off the top of my head are the lousy driver model that practically guarantees multiple broken drivers each release cycle, lousy QA and regression testing, incomplete docs that are either practically worthless lists of CLI use flags or worse a "to be done' placeholder, lack of consistency of UI, these are all SERIOUS problems, yet they never get fixed, why? Because they are ALL busted shitters. They will require months or even years of long, boring, dull, thankless, truly shitty work to be done. Now again its simply human nature that if i'm donating my time I'm gonna want to do something i enjoy, and we humans are creative creatures which is why you'll see new release after new release of software with frankly show stopping bugs. Making something new is exciting, fixing bugs is not.
In the end without a complete rewrite of the GPL (which RMS will die before allowing) so that a company can actually charge money for doing these thankless jobs they just don't get done and THAT is why Linux is frankly going nowhere on desktops. even the best estimate in favor of Linux I could find has Linux at 4.9% and that is skewed by being strictly the most geeker heavy sites on the web. think about that for a moment, 20 years, countless man hours, and Linux is BARELY beating Vista which was the most reviled and hated MSFT OS since WinME. If that isn't proof the current model simply doesn't work i don't know what does. With each release both Windows and OSX gets better and if anything I'd argue that Linux is backsliding. Linux USED to laugh about how Windows had to install clean, while ignoring the fact that Windows has such a long tail when it comes to support that most will outgrow their hardware before they need to upgrade, but they
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually unity fits in perfectly with your point in the second and third paragraphs which hits the nail on the head. You see Canonical isn't going with unity because it WANTS to, its doing so because it simply HAS NO CHOICE. they HAVE to have something they can sell on tablets, or netbooks, or something, just to keep the lights on. because sadly you've hit it dead bang on why the GPL is going nowhere fast and other licenses are doing better, because there is simply ZERO way to make money fixing the problems if the first guy you hand the code to can turn right around and undercut you thanks to having no R&D costs. Why the FOSS community can't seem to grasp something that is so blatantly obvious is beyond me but it has made corporations avoid GPL like the plague because it IS toxic. Ultimately TINSTAAFL and when linux needs at a minimum a good 60 million plus worth of work and polish to bring it up to what the current offerings of the competition are? Well as someone who has been trying Linux since 2000 I can say that while Windows and OSX have made some truly incredible leaps Linux on desktops has been nothing but a disappointment.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.