Nouveau's impact is probably greater for users of older hardware

Nouveau's impact is probably greater for users of older hardware

Posted Feb 18, 2008 20:42 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421)
Parent article: Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

Let's suppose that, in the future, ATI really does provide high-quality high-performance free drivers. They are still going to have a significant advantage over nVidia, because Nouveau's support (even when it matures) will inevitably lag some time behind nVidia's latest products.

I suspect that the greatest incentive to continue working on Nouveau has nothing to do with new hardware purchases, but rather in dealing with old hardware. There are a lot of machines out there with plenty of life left in them, but which are unfortunately saddled with nVidia cards. Getting these older machines working properly with free drivers integrated into the Linux kernel and X will benefit a lot of people, while contributing little or nothing to nVidia's bottom line.

(On the other hand, to play devil's advocate, I suppose people could purchase nVidia hardware and plan to use the closed-source driver in the short term and then switch to the free driver in the long term, lessening the advantage of a free ATI driver.)

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Any of us who have to support the random hardware thrown at us know that broad hardware
coverage is an invaluable asset to us.  Worrying about whether eight or nine people working
towards FOSS Nvidia compatibility is more of a gift than we should give to NVidia is
pointless.  They could hire 8 or 9 people of the same competence level in a heartbeat, give
them full access to the specs, and have a superior driver out in no time... without ever
really caring about FOSS users other than as just another source of revenue.