nVidia's policies suck (Was Re: 12 inch powerbook with nividia 32 mg vidioe card)

[Atro Tossavainen]

> Hello Altro,

Terry,

> While I do agree with much of what you wrote, the Nvidia drivers for x86 are 
> good

I have nothing to say on that.  For all I care, they probably work very
well.  That's not the issue, though.  The issue is: where's the nVidia
PPC Linux drivers now that somebody needs them?

Oh, the manufacturer doesn't feel the urge to support your choice of
platform?  Too bad.

And the manufacturer doesn't feel the need to give the specifications
out to the community so that volunteers could write the drivers they
need themselves, or even to other businesses willing to sign non-
disclosure agreements so that they could provide a binary-only driver
for other platforms?  Too bad.  

Fuck nVidia, I say.

> On the other hand it seems every Radeon card out needs a different driver, 
> this does not make life easy either.

I have nothing to say about the ATI binary-only x86-only drivers either
as I have never used them.  The machines we have with Radeons all have
XFree86, and as far as I know, it is fairly good.  Obviously, there are
some newer cards for which support doesn't exist yet. At any rate, ATI
does (did?) give out specifications so that people can write drivers
themselves, and ATI has (fairly recently, but anyway) allocated the
resources of a programmer of theirs to XFree86 so that you won't need
manufacturer-only binary-only x86-only drivers to get your Radeon to
work the way it was intended to in whatever computer you chose to buy.

> And one could blame Laptop makers as well for changing the GPU every time the 
> reniew a model.

Perhaps.  Third-party driver development, which is what XFree86 mostly
consists of, will always lag a little behind, but in the case of nVidia,
third-party driver development will either not exist at all or will lag
massively behind because of the need for reverse engineering.

> So I guess what we have to do is show that Linux is a OS to count with, be it 
> on x86 or PPC platform.

Or (insert any other processor architecture).

Would you really expect hardware vendors to release proprietary drivers
for their card for every possible imaginable hardware architecture/OS
combination, like Linux on x86, PPC, Alpha, SPARC, Itanium, to name but
a few of the most active ones (all of which could theoretically house
an AGP/PCI graphics card)?

I submit that because of the multi-platform nature of Linux, the only
viable driver solutions are those which are free software.

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
< URL : http : / / www . helsinki . fi / %7E atossava / >

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