Re: Statistics on non-free usage
On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 12:08:07AM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Sven Luther wrote:
> >But as you said, it doesn't really prove anything, only that the people
> >using popularity contest don't really use these non-free packages much.
> >What about all those who don't run popularity contest, or those who are
> >offline ? What about monitoring BTS traffic for those packages ?
>
> A couple whith get *extremely* prompt BTS reports if they break (and
> which tends to get fixed pretty quickly, too, interestingly) are
> nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-source.
>
> This is probably because a lot of people have NVIDIA cards, and a number
> of their cards historically haven't worked properly under the nv driver
> in X (although this is getting better, I hear). And many people don't
> want to have to buy a new video card immediately in order to switch to
> Linux (although they probably will replace it later).
Not to mention the fact that the last video card to have free 3D support
was the Radeon 8500/9000/9100/9200, and that we are pretty unlikely to
get anything else in the near future. And both ATI and Nvidia don't
provide anything else than x86 executables.
But removing those drivers from non-free will only result in more
clueless people asking for help on the debian mailing lists, while
trying to install the upstream stuff, and probably failing to do so.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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