They do sell drivers.

They do sell drivers.

Posted Apr 29, 2006 22:05 UTC (Sat) by stepz (guest, #37442)
Parent article: Some notes on Linux and free drivers

Most people who don't give a damn about software freedom (ie. the overwhelming majority of NVidia's and ATI's customerbase) base their buying decisions mostly on performance. As drivers are a really big part of the graphics performance equation, one can say that people buy the drivers in the package - they are willing to pay more for a product with better drivers.

I'll bet that graphicscompanies commit a pretty massive amount of R&D resources in their driver technology. Even if they don't admit it, it is understandable that they would like to protect their investments.

Some of the commenters here seem to underestimate the complexity of todays graphics drivers. They are a LOT more complicated than any other driver in the kernel. Nevermind the DMA, power mode handling, dynamic memory controller parameter optimization, they even contain a fullblown optimizing VLIW compiler to JIT compile shaders.

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