Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Posted Apr 20, 2006 3:52 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022)
Parent article: Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Les mots justes. There really isn't a better response to the article to be made; this is the argument. nVidia and ATi are not special WRT building complicated hardware, or having a wide range of device versions to support. Their work is in no way uniquely or insurmountably difficult.

The only excuse with any legitimate force is legal impediments provided by license incompatibilities WRT components of their drivers that they don't properly own. I've seen that one pushed about, but I haven't seen its teeth; what prevents them from releasing the bulk of the driver free and leaving us to work around the BLOBs? We have proven, excellent cleanroom reverse engineers in the community. The work can be done from specs; the work can even be done without specs, push to shove.

I have a sneaking suspicion that nVidia and ATi are not helping the problem with their driver offerings, in much the same way that bitkeeper's presence under not-totally-repulsive terms stalled its replacement. But nobody is really pushing in the same way, either. There is the expensive nature of gathering up enough varieties of either company's product to be considered; it's not like they will donate a set to be coded for, like has been done by other hardware companies. Though, if they did, it might be cheaper in the long run than doing their development in-house. If they're not worried about intellectual property, as they say...

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