Originally posted by: TerryMathews
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: SickBeast
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Not at all. I like speculating on new technologies. It's a lot of fun. But nVidia is useless to me. They don't support FOSS, so I do my best to not support them.
Do you mean Linux? I thought nVidia had the best Linux drivers. Or do you want them to let haxorz modify their drivers/bios'es? Because I don't think many hardware manufacturers would allow that...
All they need to do is release documentation so driver hackers can write drivers. And yes, plenty of companies do that.
Name one worth owning. ATi doesn't.
Matrox did for a while. I haven't checked to see if they still do. AMD lent out hardware to all sorts of various groups, even some smaller ones. Intel OPEN SOURCES their drivers (almost as good as docs). VIA gave out documentation, and I believe a bit of hardware. IBM has been pumping money, hardware, and developers into Linux. There are
5 companies properly supporting FOSS, to varying degrees. 4 are kinda big companies these days.
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Originally posted by: TerryMathews
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Not at all. I like speculating on new technologies. It's a lot of fun. But nVidia is useless to me. They don't support FOSS, so I do my best to not support them.
They most certainly do. nVidia doesn't open-source their drivers, but they do support FOSS. That's why you can download a driver set for Linux
and FreeBSD.
That isn't support.
Really, then tell me what is.
Either putting out documentation so that people that will support FOSS can write drivers, or writing drivers under a reasonable license.
To me, support is having an engineer on the other end of the line, whom you can tell "Driver version xx.yy is causing a kernel dump in conjunction with module xyz in kernel 2.6.6" and the engineer will figure out a solution.
That's well and good for some company, and OPEN SOURCING the drivers, or releasing documentation does not prevent this.
The same statement on most FOSS development lists will get you a curt "RTFM and fix it yourself".
How the hell are FOSS developers going to track down problems if they don't have access to all of the source you are using? How will they know the problem is with the kernel or some random module and now nVidia's drivers? That's why kernels with nVidia drivers loaded on are TAINTED.
Support for FOSS is not treating them like an annoying child. Don't give us candy, pat us on the head, and tell us to run along. The condecending BS nVidia is giving the FOSS community is insulting at best.
Where's the support for NetBSD? OpenBSD? Native support for DragonflyBSD? They get x.org support done yet? What nVidia is doing isn't supporting the FOSS community.