Let's talk outcomes
Let me just draw up a couple outcomes:
a) The open source community with some help from the participating companies gets their act together and deliver a state of the art drivers and infrastructure for all graphics cards that will open their specs.
b) The open source community continues to remain a divided bunch of experimental efforts (different driver projects, infrastructure projects that go nowhere, license issues and so on) that never really catch up with current technology and hardware.
This is already an experiment in progress for AMD. The question seems to be whether nVidia should join them or not. If you think that comes for free, you can't have been hanging out here very long. I don't know how many hours AMD has spent on compiling and clearing documentation (apart from their code contributions) but it's been many. What have they really gotten in return?
I know it's frustrating not being able to track down a bug but from nVidias point of view, is it worth spending 1000 hours to get 10 hours of minor fixes back? No. If they don't believe that the OSS community will ever amount to much, releasing specifications has no business case.
Of course, then someone will always say "Release the specs and we'll build a great driver for you, just you see!". If you want nVidia to release specs, the best you could do is get an AMD card and start hacking to make that a smashing success. Or at least that it'll give enough in return that clearing specs isn't a complete waste of time.
In short, I'll take a good blob over poor open source any day. If the alternative is dual-booting into Windows, which is all blobs then it's still the better option even though I prefer open source. Not above everything else though.
Let me just draw up a couple outcomes:
a) The open source community with some help from the participating companies gets their act together and deliver a state of the art drivers and infrastructure for all graphics cards that will open their specs.
b) The open source community continues to remain a divided bunch of experimental efforts (different driver projects, infrastructure projects that go nowhere, license issues and so on) that never really catch up with current technology and hardware.
This is already an experiment in progress for AMD. The question seems to be whether nVidia should join them or not. If you think that comes for free, you can't have been hanging out here very long. I don't know how many hours AMD has spent on compiling and clearing documentation (apart from their code contributions) but it's been many. What have they really gotten in return?
I know it's frustrating not being able to track down a bug but from nVidias point of view, is it worth spending 1000 hours to get 10 hours of minor fixes back? No. If they don't believe that the OSS community will ever amount to much, releasing specifications has no business case.
Of course, then someone will always say "Release the specs and we'll build a great driver for you, just you see!". If you want nVidia to release specs, the best you could do is get an AMD card and start hacking to make that a smashing success. Or at least that it'll give enough in return that clearing specs isn't a complete waste of time.
In short, I'll take a good blob over poor open source any day. If the alternative is dual-booting into Windows, which is all blobs then it's still the better option even though I prefer open source. Not above everything else though.
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