Re: NVidia, Open Your Eyes (and Sources!) (was: Re: Nvidia + 2.4)
On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 03:59:36AM -0900, Ethan Benson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 01:26:05PM +0100, Philipp Schulte wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 01:48:44AM -0200, Rogerio Brito wrote:
> >
> > > P.S.: On the other hand, people could make an organized initiative to
> > > promote a petition to make NVidia aware of the Open Source movement
> > > and ask thm for open drivers.
> > >
> > > Of course they are aware of Open Source, but a friendly reminder
> > > together with signatures of lots of people (among which are potential
> > > customers) is a great incentive for any company to change its mind.
> >
> > I once read a statement of an NVidia-guy who said that they would like
> > to open their source code but they can't because of several NDA with
> > other companys.
> > Phil
>
> Rogerio's point still stands, NVidia's reasons for being Free Software
> hostile are irrelevant and of no concern to me/us. My message to this
> and other such companies is simple: if your hardware is not well
> supported by Free software (meaning NO proprietary, kernels modules,
> XF4 modules, libraries etc etc) then i will will take my business
> elsewhere. I don't care what the excuse is, if they feel they need to
> sign NDA's with some company that prevent them from properly
> documenting the hardware or releasing driver source, that is fine but
> that choice will cost them customers.
I did not try to justify this behaviour and I don't want to find
excuses for it. I am glad that NVidia decided to release drivers at
all but that of course is not enough.
AFAIK there are not many companys that release Linux-drivers and so
picking on NVidia might be ok but others deserve it much more.
I hope that in the near future NVidia will produce new chips without
NDAs and release free drivers (yes, call me naive).
Phil
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