Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA's New GPUs Are Very Open-Source Unfriendly
An anonymous reader writes: The Nouveau driver developers working on open-source support for the GeForce 900 Maxwell graphics cards have found this new generation to be "very open-source unfriendly" and restricting. NVIDIA began requiring signed firmware images, which they have yet to provide to Nouveau developers, contrary to their earlier statements. The open-source developers have also found their firmware signing to go beyond just simple security precautions. For now the open-source NVIDIA driver can only enable displays with the GTX 900 series without any hardware acceleration.
What? It's the manufacturer creating a flawed product that hurts the brand, but let's blame the victim and pretend it's not. How do niche users hurt the brand? The people hurting the brand are, arguably, people who say "this doesn't play my AAA game," or "I have artifacts when I use this card," not the guys posting their OSS linux problems.
It costs more time and money to make things so opaque. The people who care (AMD, Intel) will reverse engineer that shit anyway. Some guy in his basement writing drivers is not your competition, but he is a potential customer.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Classic. Only a Linux freak would call this sequence "easy".
"So, all you have to do is get some eye of newt, boil it in a kettle of nettles and hogwort for 40 days. Then you grow a beard. Recompile the kernel. Join the Rastafarians and abstain from eating meat, but do some serious ganja. Get a tattoo. Stalk RMS and get punched in the face. Run the entire LFS sequence. Eat a worm, get ejected from the Rastafarians. Wax on, wax off. Fork Ubuntu. Claim to have invented the semicolon. Etc., etc."