OpenTheBlob.com Gets 9,000 Signatures

When OpenTheBlob.com started in late February, within one week of its launch it already had 5,000 signatures and days later it passed the 6,000 and 7,000 marks too. This letter was an open letter to NVIDIA looking for more information on their open-source strategy. While things have slowed down, this past week it crossed the point of having 9,000 signatures!

Unfortunately, NVIDIA has yet to shed any light on any revisions to their Linux drivers/support. We are, however, still confident that NVIDIA will be opening up and sooner rather than later. Back at the Linux Foundation Summit, Austin, media personnel were disinvited on the second and third days, but yours truly managed to attend.

In the press release issued earlier this week by the Linux Foundation (LF Summit Highlights), they mention that key OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo) "will encourage chipset and other component vendors to provide open source drivers for Linux. The companies announced on stage that they will now include wording in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the delivery of open source drivers for transparent integration into the Linux kernel." While that statement can be interpreted in several different ways, what wasn't mentioned in this press release what was said by Dell's John Hull and others about ATI and NVIDIA towards the end of that talk. That there was by far the most interesting highlight of the second day, but unfortunately we're not able to talk about it.