Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

[DeepDayze]

This is quite a shame for NVIDIA. They don't want to deliver open source drivers? Ok..... but they sure can send free cards to the nouveau developers.

And along with the hands off approach including not providing any assistance nor hindering the project nVidia is going to be on the short end of the stick.

At least PathScale is doing a service helping out the nouveau developers with this project

[bulletxt]

This is quite a shame for NVIDIA. They don't want to deliver open source drivers? Ok..... but they sure can send free cards to the nouveau developers.

[droidhacker]

Given the power consumption of those horrid monsters, you can NOT call this "free". Those beasts will run you broke just in electricity costs!

[whizse]

The offer clearly states:

If you're interested please contact me offlist with a brief description
of your background, the contributions you made to open source and what
you'd intend to do with the card.

so I doubt there's any risk of freeloaders.

[cl333r]

...as the Mesa/Gallium3D stack is still trying to catch-up to the OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2 specifications.

And I hope OpenGL 3.3 too.
Also, I hope PathScale won't be handing out free video-cards to anyone who claims he's a open-source (GPU) developer without checking that info first as otherwise the freeloaders would be the first to benefit.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a hardware sponsorship...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODE4Mg