id Software: Linux Hasn't Produced Positive Results

[gamerk2]

So, even applications such as Adobe Director are poorly written? The problem is, you can?t keep anything as before if you change stuff - you can hold up older interfaces, till appoaches completely differ and then they are broken no matter how good they are written. Software is a process. So, you idea is to put the weight of maintaining ABI compatibility on library and kernel hackers shoulders. Their idea is however, no matter how long you maintain, it still will break at some time. Linux is a moving target, Windows is a lagging target. I?m quite sure most of the programmers are capable to catch up and there is no need for (effort of) compability layer. As I said, being Linux user for 5 years, I have never seen segfaults on a stable version of a supported application.

Funny, currently playing a very early Win32 game on Windows 7, using a Glide to DX wrapper [because the game was coded for Glide first and formost; the OGL 1.0 and DX5 engines look horrid in comparison]. So a game that was designed for Win95, using a totally different graphics backend, API, threading model [preemptive instead of cooperative], and graphics API works, and the application runs without issues over a decade later.

To this day I have no idea why Linux devs keep destroying their API's every few years. It scares off developers, who want to release their program ONCE, and not have to redesign it every few years. And API is nothing more then a way to tell the host OS to "do something". If you want to change how that API works under the hood, fine. But there is no reason to remove API calls from an OS, ever.

[ninez]

Aside from the obvious anecdotal evidence/exception-to-the-rule fallacy...
How is this not running Windows software on linux (where obviously you could just run it on Windows... VSTs being the native format of Steinberg's Cubase, and apparently your VSTs are for the Windows version of that. There is no linux version btw).

did i say it wasn't running windows software on linux - NO i did not. But i don't hate windows applications, nor am i running them because i 'don't want to give them up' - i run them because they are good. - thus i have proven your claim as to why wine exists is nothing more than fallacious and your own stupid opinion... the VST spec was made by Stienberg, yes - BUT AFAIK is not just for Cubase, but is essentially the plugin standard for most apps, including Protools, Renoise, FLstudio, etc.... But linux also has native VST support in apps like Renoise, Ardour, etc. - you obviously are just googling this stuff and don't know what you are talking about. VSTs are NOT just for Cubase and ANYONE who has been into proaudio/computer music even moderately would know that :\

VMWare is also used for running Windows-on-Windows, or linux-on-linux etc. Hardware virtualization is something completely different than Wine.

that doesn't change how stupid your definition of Wine is for was. - and that was my point - it would be STUPID to say that about VMware, just as your definition of Wine is moronic.

Sure I know about that... but that is the NT kernel of Windows NT, again the kernel named after the OS (Windows NT goes far beyond just the kernel, the whole Win32API is part of NT, and was backported to Win16 and later Win9x variations).

Nope. you would be wrong. Maybe you should actually do some research on this stuff before making claims that to anyone who remembers this stuff KNOWS better. Or you could have done yourself a small favor and actually have read wikipedia;

It is popularly believed that Dave Cutler[2] intended the initialism "WNT" as a pun on VMS, incrementing each letter by one. However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand.[3] One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor?the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").[4] Various Microsoft publications, including a 1998 question-and-answer session with Bill Gates, reveal that the letters were expanded to "New Technology" for marketing purposes but no longer carry any specific meaning.[5] The letters were dropped from the name of Windows 2000, though Microsoft described the product as "Built on NT technology".

yup. you don't know what your talking about at all...

Yes, so the X stands for 10, not for 'X Not Unix'. It's the same thing as Windows NT still being called Windows, but essentially being an entirely new OS. Has something to do with strong brandnames and all that.

*face palm*. (MacOS) X (Not Unix). the X is the important piece there, which yes stands for ten - but guess what - so does the 'X' in X not unix... you can play games all you like, but you are still straight up, WRONG. Windows branding is different. the underlying parts of the OS are known as Windows NT (regardless of changes) it's just the branding that changes with names like Vista, win7/8 - sort of like how Apple uses Leopard, lion, etc. it would seem to me your are trying to compare apples to oranges, instead of comparing 2 things that are actually similar.

Hold that thought there... OS X initially also ran on PPC, you know.. Apple didn't make the transition to x86 until a few years later.

Was MacOS 9 ported to Intel? NO. Was MacOS 9 a completely different OS than MacOSX?? YES.

Yes, MacOSX initially ran on PPC, but that doesn't change anything that i said, dude. the fact is OS9 was built on PPC and it's underlying components were vastly different than MacOS X. You have done nothing to argue that, here other than bring up something that is rather pointless.

[russofris]

What point are you making? That NVIDIA has the capacity to open source their drivers or that they can make Optimus work on Linux? Because neither one seems reasonably feasible at this point.

The former. The only thing that prevents the release of their driver as OSS is the imaginary invisible spaghetti monster, which is the same entity that prevents my son from picking up his matchbox cars. Other entities have demonstrated that OSS drivers can be released. I have demonstrated that it is possible to pick up matchbox cars.

When someone comes along and says "we cannot release the UVD bits without compromising vendor keys", we need to call bullshit. It's like they're saying "we cannot release OpenSSL without compromising Verisign's CA". We know this to be untrue, because we have OpenSSL. If the implementation exposes keys, then the implementation is so severely broken that it no longer constitutes encryption.

When someone comes along and says "we cannot release our S3TC source code, as it would be a violation of S3's rights granted by the USPO", we need to call bullshit. If this were the case, the USPO would be in violation by virtue of their publication of the patent, and you would be required to obtain a license prior to being able to view the patent.

When someone comes along and says "I can't do it", we need to call bullshit. Pick up the matchbox cars, put them in the box.

F

[johnc]

It depends what is meant by "we cannot".

If by "we cannot" it means "we cannot justify the expenses associated with open-sourcing our code base", then that's their explanation. If it's "we cannot open source our drivers without exposing technology we want to keep private", that's another explanation. But I don't think NVIDIA has ever said "our hands are completely tied and we have no choice in the matter at all".

I personally don't know the legal case for exposing third-party IP. I'm assuming some algorithms are IP-protected but perhaps are just stored in firmware (like h.264 decoding... I don't think that algorithm is open source and probably not in the driver anyway?).

But either way the point is that Linus is FOS. Somebody asked him about Optimus and he went on to whine about NVIDIA, as if it was their fault because their drives are closed, rather than a deficiency in Linux that prevents the functionality. Well, Linus needs to accept the reality that closed-sourced drivers are just a common part of making an OS work.

[russofris]

I personally don't know the legal case for exposing third-party IP. I'm assuming some algorithms are IP-protected but perhaps are just stored in firmware (like h.264 decoding... I don't think that algorithm is open source and probably not in the driver anyway?).

But either way the point is that Linus is FOS. Somebody asked him about Optimus and he went on to whine about NVIDIA, as if it was their fault because their drives are closed, rather than a deficiency in Linux that prevents the functionality. Well, Linus needs to accept the reality that closed-sourced drivers are just a common part of making an OS work.

In the case of h264, we know that it can be released because x264 and ffmpeg exist, and do not violate anyone's copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, or patents 'in source form'. They (the organization releasing ffmpeg) would need a license from MPEGLA if they were to release a binary.

In the case of Linus being FOS, I think that it was more a lack of diplomacy and an immature expression of his frustration than an illogical conclusion/evaluation to the current situation. He wants cooperation, Nvidia says they cant because of the Boogie-Man, Linus lets them know how he feels about it. We all know the boogie man isn't real. We'd be better off if Nvidia stopped pretending and said something like, "There is no reason we cannot release our driver source code, but we're still not going to".

If they did that, all of these stupid forum arguments about IP, and licensing, and imaginary barriers would go away. Instead we're stuck arguing about how big and bad the boogie-main is, and how he's gonna come and get'cha.

It's ridiculous. There is no boogie-man. We all need to grow the F up.

F

[finalzone]

Ahh, no.
Android is an official trademark of Google. It is just that: 'Android'. Not 'Android/Linux' or anything. Android, period.
As for GNU/Linux, that's what RMS wants you to call it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of consensus about this.
For example, I don't see any reference to GNU here: http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu
Now that's the largest linux distribution available today, I think I'll just go with that.
In fact, note also that they refer to their OS distribution only as 'Ubuntu', not as 'Ubuntu Linux' or anything... and certainly not 'GNU/Linux'.

That is just branding 101 for marketing purpose which still does not change what are underneath them. Android is nothing more than Dalvik (Java based platform) with Linux kernel. Same for Ubuntu which uses GNU platform (mainly compiled with GCC) and Linux kernel.

Just because they challenge things doesn't mean they're right. You certainly aren't!

I am not afraid to be wrong, that is human nature to learn from the mistake. Can you do the same?

[johnc]

Nobody is making arguments about boogie-men or spaghetti monsters.

NVIDIA has explained why they're not open sourcing their drivers, and they've never claimed it's completely for reasons outside of its control.

[russofris]

NVIDIA has explained why they're not open sourcing their drivers, and they've never claimed it's completely for reasons outside of its control.

Was it not until just recently (in response to Linus in fact), that they distanced them from their prior IP claims? Their response indicated that they were going to support their users via the common code, and not support linux in the manner prescribed by Linus (and other maintainers). Prior to this we had the IP boogie-man, and the boogie man was, and probably still is, their reasoning for the choice that they made.

Take a look at this with me:

While we understand that some people would prefer us to provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure. While this may not please everyone, it does allow us to provide the most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system.

It's a neat game-of-words. The sentence "a decision to support Linux on our GPUs" is kinda crafty, as it leaves you wondering who is supporting what and where, and what "support" means. It's beautifully ambiguous. It should read "a decision to support Linux users that have purchased our GPUs", because they are not supporting linux. They feel as if they are allowing their customers to run linux.

"regardless of platform or operating system", except for the MIPS platform, which we just lost a bajillion dollars on in china..

"this may not please everyone", meaning almost anyone that is currently running linux.

It all strikes me as snarky in a passive aggressive way. Perhaps it's clear cut and my BS-meter is registering a false-positive.

F

[Scali]

Yes, non-managed code is still allowed. They haven?t touched it, yet.

Win8 still has full Win32API support, so we'll be safe for a while yet.
Native code is far too widespread at this point for MS to even consider dropping it.
.NET hasn't quite caught on yet, at least not with major commercial applications. Heck, even MS still writes stuff like Office with native code.

Thats decision from people "above", and they find it ok - a fair trade-off for a clean ecosystem.

As long as you only want to support open source applications, and like to redo the same packaging work that all the gazillion other distros are doing as well, fine.
But then don't complain when big developers such as Adobe or game devs aren't interested in supporting your OS.

So, even applications such as Adobe Director are poorly written?

I wouldn't know, I'm not familiar with that application, let alone how it is written. But it's possible, sure. Why not? Because Adobe is a large company, there can't be incompetence and ignorance? If only we were so lucky.

The problem is, you can?t keep anything as before if you change stuff - you can hold up older interfaces, till appoaches completely differ and then they are broken no matter how good they are written.

Sure you can, just look at how COM does it, for example. A single object can implement multiple interfaces.
Or Direct3D, where they just make new objects with new interfaces, rather than extending previous versions. Yes, even on Windows 7 x64, you can still run Direct3D1 applications. I know, I've tried.

Their idea is however, no matter how long you maintain, it still will break at some time.

Then their idea of software development is wrong. There are plenty of real-world examples of OSes and applications that are older than linux itself, and still work fine today. Yet linux, in its short lifespan has already broken compatibility numerous times.

Linux is a moving target, Windows is a lagging target.

Windows is a moving target as well, they are just more careful about how they change and extend functionality, so they maintain much better compatibility.
I mean, take the above example of Direct3D1 code running on Windows 7. Direct3D1 was originally developed for Win95. NT itself is already a completely different kernel from the Win9x branch. Aside from that, since Win95/NT4, Windows has gone through two major display driver revisions (WDM and now WDDM). So basically everything about the kernel and driver is completely different from the environment of Win95/D3D1 back in the day. Yet the applications still work.

It is best you keep the entire system up-to-date, then no parts lag behind and cause circular stuff.

I don't think you got my point:
Even *if* I keep my entire ports tree up-to-date, and rebuild all dependencies of an app from source, it *still* doesn't always work.

You absolutely need to break something in order to change it

Patently false, again, see above example of Direct3D1.

Cmmon, stop perverting my quotes, you can do it

I merely added the relevant context from the sentence to which you responded. Stop weaseling out of it. You responded to "Becase you *can* use Android 2.0 packages on Android 4.0" by saying "No you can't". Which is obviously wrong.

But please don?t push on porting windows registry in linux

I'm not sure why you keep bringing the Windows registry into the conversation. It is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Lets talk about Valve or Blender then.

Sure, let's talk about Valve: They always used Direct3D. They only use OpenGL now, because they are porting their engine to OSes where you have no choice. It remains to be seen whether they replace the Windows versions with OpenGL versions at some point. Currently all Valve games are still D3D on Windows (some 2 years after Valve released their OpenGL-based OS X ports).

Blender is a toy, not professional software.

Also, you are again forgetting about WINE - an effort to port closed source system is much more difficult than simply getting open spec?ed stack cast down for free.

What does Wine have to do with the fact that OpenGL is the only 3D API on linux? Wine still uses OpenGL to render D3D stuff. It has no other choice.

[Scali]

What propaganda did you consume, or what trick of intellect did it take, to make you choose to operate in such an injured fashion?

Oh yes, let's throw some ad hominems in there, while I merely point out that most IHVs and ISVs don't opt for open source (easily verifiable fact). I even say that they may not even be right about this, it's just not relevant. They say no to open source, so as an open source driver developer, you are naive to expect them to support you.