NVIDIA Denies Opening Up Its Driver

[mrintegrity]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Denies Opening Up Its Driver
This would likely result in a fork, legal action, or other challenges in order to overturn such a decision to reach a new common ground. If no common ground was reached, NVIDIA and AMD would be put in an awkward position of not being able to support their workstation customers with the high-performance drivers they need as they can't have some of their third-party intellectual property and other work exposed in an open-source driver. If it were really severe, the workstation business could just pack up and move to another operating system. That's what some fear at least...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjU0NQ

Bit of a rant that eh? Exactly what evidence do you have that such doom scenarios might occur? Please provide more information about who you are referring to when you say "That's what some fear at least..."... is that just like a dream you had or something?

Alan

[dickeywang]

Nvidia is putting a lot of hope on its CUDA library and has spent a lot of money to convincing people in the parallel computing community to look at the possibility of doing high performance computing on their GPUs, so I doubt Nvidia would open their driver source until it has established a dominance in that field.

[curaga]

Since we are talking about AMD and Intel here too, do you think Intel will go blob with Larrabee, to archieve the higher performance/DRM?

[bridgman]

And lets face the facts here, when (not if) binary blobs are denied access to the kernel the only company that will be prepared for it is Intel. If ATi continues down the path that they chose it is doomed to fail. And the only one at fault is themselves. The way I see it is when Intel releases a top end competitor nVidia is doomed. ATi still has a chance if the open driver is mature enough to take on the full load of supporting the Linux community. If not then ATi is doomed as well.

I'm still not getting your point. All the open source drivers use the same framework, and they will all make progress at approximately the same rate. We need to stay focused on 6xx 3d support for another month or two, but after that we'll just be another part of the community helping to push things along where we can.

[bridgman]

Bit of a rant that eh? Exactly what evidence do you have that such doom scenarios might occur? Please provide more information about who you are referring to when you say "That's what some fear at least..."... is that just like a dream you had or something?

Not a question of fear, more like predictable cause-and-effect. If binary drivers are blocked before open source drivers are ready to provide comparable performance and features that is going to cause problems for at least one significant portion of the Linux user base. Those companies are using Linux because it works for them, and if serious obstacles are raised I would expect them to move to another platform. Could be Windows, could be a Unix-based OS, or (as Michael hinted) the distros could potentially back out the changes in order to retain their customer base.

You're probably asking "why do I care ?".

A non-trivial part of the development activity in Linux is funded by companies who make a living providing software and services to high end commercial users (Red Hat and Novell being the most obvious ones). I believe server sales are still the biggest contributor but workstation revenues are not that far behind. At some point the distros (who employ many of the developers on the list) will start to feel the pinch...

...and *that*s when the really interesting discussions will start to happen.

[Melcar]

Since we are talking about AMD and Intel here too, do you think Intel will go blob with Larrabee, to archieve the higher performance/DRM?

It wouldn't surprise me if they did.

[Kano]

Intel already added a loader for a binary part to the driver, maybe then they will use it.

[Tsiolkovsky]

here's an interesting blog post from a KDE developer's point of view: How NVIDIA Impedes Free Desktop Adoption. Looks like bad closed source NVIDIA drivers cause a lot of problems for KDE 4.

[Chris]

How NVIDIA Impedes Free Desktop Adoption.

I think that post is a bit one sided. Sure, nVidia's drivers have problems, but what driver (open or closed) doesn't? It's not like open source drivers are more stable.

But it makes me wonder.. how would free desktop adoption be with only open source drivers? Well, for one, we could kiss next gen gaming goodbye..

[duby229]

I'm still not getting your point. All the open source drivers use the same framework, and they will all make progress at approximately the same rate. We need to stay focused on 6xx 3d support for another month or two, but after that we'll just be another part of the community helping to push things along where we can.

That is exactly my point. Being another part of the community should be your sole priority. It should consume 100% of your focus. Permanently, from this day forward. It should be the only concern that you have.