Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Quote of the week

Posted Dec 16, 2004 14:37 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: Quote of the week by mrshiny
Parent article: Quote of the week

The idea is to encourage you to buy hardware with open source support
(read that as manufacturers releasing enough specs for open source folks
to decently support it) next time. If enough people are so encouraged,
it'll drive demand for such hardware, and someone will fill it, even if
the current big players refuse to do so. It's not the kernel folks who
chose to keep their stuff proprietary so it couldn't be supported and
updated along with the rest of the kernel tree.

I'm running an ATI 9200se graphics card. Why? Because it's about the
last card ATI produced that they made the specs available for, thus, that
has decent open source support. NVidia never has, and ATI got tired of
the old XFree folks dragging their feet so quit doing so as well. Perhaps
they'll be persuaded to change their mind, with a much more responsive
Xorg, which has vastly improved the open source Radeon drivers over the
last year. That 9200 might not be the fastest on the block, but it works,
and I'm not supporting products where the manufacturer has chosen not to
support open source by even making the hardware specs available.

Duncan

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Quote of the week

Posted Dec 16, 2004 15:09 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]

I understand the need to buy hardware that is supported with open-source drivers. But what if you can't get hardware that is supported? My need to use the computer outweighs my need to use open-source drivers. This is especially true of many businesses which rely on custom solutions. They can't just stop using a piece of hardware because it's not supported; they are locked in. Sometimes there is no alternative anyway, open or not.

For example, take video cards. You mentioned that you use an older model of video card because it's the last well-supported ATI card. Using an older card won't help you play Doom3; you need a newer card that has better features. Your choices are: buy ATI or nVidia, or don't play Doom3. The applications (or games) drive the computer, not political ideology. A computer doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Anyway, your comment about the relationship between ATI and XFree86 seems to prove my point: commercial companies won't support Linux/Free software if they have to keep working around the games and politics of the developers.

Quote of the week

Posted Dec 16, 2004 15:37 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

You rather dimiss the option 'don't play Doom3', but I think that is the correct choice in the circumstances and the one I am currently choosing. I agree that sometimes it is not practical to avoid non-free drivers, but the advantages of doing so are huge, and personally I don't mind at all if the kernel developers build those advantages even higher.

We design hardware and one of the most important criteria is 'are there specs or a free driver for it' - if not it doesn't get designed in. I'm sure there are loads of companies making this same choice, and I'm pretty confident that free drivers will win in the end (modulo life being made impossible by bad patent law).

Quote of the week

Posted Dec 16, 2004 16:22 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]

Well, I used Doom3 as an example, since it is the choice I am making soon when I upgrade my hardware. However, the analogy stands, for people who have legitimate needs that are not met by opensource drivers. Don't get me wrong: I wish NVidia had better opensource support. But even if all I used linux for was 2D, the nv driver that ships with X.org is much slower than the NVidia driver. Frankly there's no choice when it comes to video cards for me: NVidia or ATI. If there were a video card maker who had cards that had nearly the 3d quality of these two, but worked with a 100% open-source driver, I'd jump on that in a second. But the reality is that there is not, and my "need" is to play Doom3, so I am locked into a proprietary driver.

Some people need other particular hardware to get their job done, and there is no chance to replace it with something better. As a hardware maker, you can make choices about the hardware and its openness, but as a hardware user I have to buy the hardware that does the job, or do without. For many people, doing without isn't an option.

Quote of the week

Posted Jan 3, 2005 16:59 UTC (Mon) by atrius (guest, #26979) [Link]

No, what it really ends up causing is people asking someone like me if a given piece of hardware works in Linux and I am forced to answer with either a no, or yes, but only if you're using distro A, with kernel B, with sub-patch C. Especially in the category of video cards. Yes, there are open source drivers for most/all video cards. Most of them just suck or only support the bare minimum of the feature set. Most often without 3D support at all, or at least not all of the features. Yeah, that sounds good.