Do it for the users [LWN.net]

Do it for the users

Posted Feb 19, 2008 4:10 UTC (Tue) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998)
Parent article: Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

There's no evidence of nVidia becoming nice, so I think the wise thing to do is keep reverse engineering — for the users.

I bought a laptop with a broadcom wireless chip. At the time there was no driver for it, so I just used wired networking for a year. Then the bcm43xx driver became available (now b43) which has been marvellous for allowing me to use my hardware. Remember that free drivers are a chicken and egg problem. By providing reverse engineered drivers, more users will be able to use Linux effectively on their hardware, leading to a larger market.

One commenter pointed out that reverse engineered drivers are usually months or years behind their competitors. Combined with a large user base, that becomes noticeable in a business sense (I think they call it "lost sales"). An example here is the nv driver compared with the radeon driver — radeon has full XRandR 1.2 support, whereas nv has only very limited support. This has been enough for me to choose ATi over nVidia, and because the radeon driver is good enough to drive my dual-head desktop with OpenGL, I have no need to install proprietary drivers.

There was some interesting discussion between Dirk Hohndel and Dave Airlie at the end of Dirk's talk at LCA (video). Dave's point was that nVidia misses out on big contracts such as when Dell seeks suppliers, because Dell requires that all the hardware have supported, free drivers. Again, money talks.

Corrections welcome.

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