Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Posted Apr 20, 2006 7:51 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

This is similar to TV, magazines, newspapers, and grocery stores. You're not a customer at all, there: you're the product. The advertiser is the customer. Your eyes are being delivered to the customer. Running a grocery store chain is a lot like real estate: Kellogg and Pepsi pay a high rent on the shelves you're most likely to see, and may even stock those shelves themselves.

What has this to do with graphics cards? Most of ATI's and Nvidia's money comes not from selling cards to people like you, but from getting their stuff integrated into complete systems. Their real customers are Dell & HP. When those guys ask for Free drivers, ATI & Nvidia will gladly hand them over. If they find that big customers (still not you; rather, GM or the DOD) are buying systems with i915 video instead of theirs because of the Free drivers, they might see the light, but they will probably only find that out because their own customers complain about lost sales. Dell & HP are more likely to offer GM and the DOD systems with i915 inside than complain to ATI or Nvidia.

Meanwhile, people at GM & the DOD who care about Free drivers find it nearly impossible to communicate that to anyone responsible for making buying decisions, or to anyone who ever talks to Dell or HP.

The problem is that the channel from people who care to people who decide leaks too much information. Very little gets all the way through. In some ways it's astonishing that modern markets function at all, with all the machinery that has been built up to filter out meaningful information.