Originally posted by cl333r
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NVIDIA's Response To Recent Nouveau Work
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Exactly as I told a few days ago
Originally posted by Smorg View PostThe important difference is: AMD actually wants free software solutions for their hardware. Nvidia does not.
An, please, don't forget that the world changes and people too. Maybe NVIDIA's just trying to muster its courage to make the first step.Last edited by birdie; 15 December 2009, 05:23 AM.
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I want to say Nvidia must be insane. The reason this seams like a reasonable course of action is because of the way Andy described the architecture of the proprietary driver. With the vast majority of the codebase being shared between platforms, it stands to reason that they can't simply open-source it for similar reasons AMD couldn't simply re-license their fglrx driver under the GPL.
That sucks for Nvidia, but I suppose they don't really have an alternative unless they tried documenting the hardware and releasing it to open-source developers.
Personally, I'll be buying AMD/ATI from now on. I'm already getting decent initial 3D support on my 4870 with the very first DRI release in 2.6.32 to support it. Its only a matter of time before the quality of the completely free radeon driver blows Nvidia's proprietary driver out of the water. After that happens it will be really hard for desktop users to justify buying Nvidia.
I really don't want to support a company that intentionally distances themselves from those trying to provide free-as-in-freedom support for their hardware.
I don't see nVidia caring that much what nouveau get up to with their cards, and given the grief AMD/ATI have received for "Not opening the blob" since they delivered specs, I wouldn't blame nVidia for not openly helping any FOSS driver. After all, damned if they do, damned if they don't, why waste time and resources doing only to be damned anyway.
The important difference is: AMD actually wants free software solutions for their hardware. Nvidia does not.
Originally posted by cl33r(1) cause they don't want to share their software solutions with their competitorsLast edited by Smorg; 15 December 2009, 01:57 AM.
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Not wishing to voice the really cynical suggestion, but what if nVidia ARE infringing someones patent? If they even suspect that is the case, the code is staying closed.
I don't see nVidia caring that much what nouveau get up to with their cards, and given the grief AMD/ATI have recieved for "Not opening the blob" since they delivered specs, I wouldn't blame nVidia for not openly helping any FOSS driver. Afterall, damned if they do, damned if they don't, why waste time and resources doing only to be damned anyway.
In the PR stakes we Linux lovers really don't know how to play the game...
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Originally posted by cl333r View Post"Rarely" is still too much. Getting sued only once still can cost millions of dollars. So imho it's still a good reason to keep the source closed.
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"Rarely" is still too much. Getting sued only once still can cost millions of dollars. So imho it's still a good reason to keep the source closed.
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If nouveau becomes as good as nvidia's binary driver then Nvidia should be very happy about it because Nvidia's only goal is to sell hardware, they keep developing a driver only because without a good driver their hardware would be mostly worthless / much less competitive.
But they can't open source their driver and hand it over to the community (1) cause they don't want to share their software solutions with their competitors and (2) because if it uses somewhere patented stuff (even inadvertently for there are thousands of patents all over) the patent trolls/companies can't sue Nvidia cause they can't look up their patents in Nvidia's source code.
So a really qualitative nouveau driver should be a relief for Nvidia and they could transfer the lots of folks working on its drivers to work on actually further improving its hardware (which Nvidia is all about) and leave the software development to the folks in the open source world and only help them when help is due.
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Do you think they'll ever drop any cards from the nv driver (possibly because the nouveau driver is better on those cards than the nv driver?), or things will stay as they are for the foreseeable future?
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Originally posted by MostAwesomeDude View Post
In case of the first, could you ask then to open source it?
In case of the second, what do you think nVidia's "fell of ownership" is for the microcode?
Could there be innovative things going on in there, so they don't want AMD to learn from them?
Or is microcode so specific to the card, and non related to performance, that they wouldn't care if it got distributed?
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