Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

TOO, not to! :(

I don't see how nouveau would solve the problem that the manufacturer of a product is not
willing to release how the product works.

Do you really think it's ok to always play catch-up and reverse engineer what is willingly
hidden?

My (current) and next cards are not from Nvidia. This is the only language companies
understand.

I just love to sink my feet into a nice lawn of astroturf on a Friday afternoon.

> The power users (3D designers; movie makers; geologist; and zillions more)
> who actually need the very best have no choice but to use NVIDIA; there's
> no one else who comes close at the high end.

Eh?  I know fanbois get a little overheated on slashdot and gaming sites but we don't normally
see that sort of thing here on LWN.  AMD/ATI and NVidia have been leapfrogging each other for
about a decade now, stealing the performance crown back from their rival every couple of
months.  Were NVidia the undisputed king your statement would have merit, but in the real
world it is just silly.

On techical merit arguments for both ATI and NVidia can be made.  Intel and VIA aren't in the
same catagory.  But having a supported configuration is not just a political question, it is
also a very legitimate technical issue as well.  This time last year you had to give up
support for performance because both of the vendors of high performance hardware had closed
binary drivers, but that is changing.  NVidia is now the lone holdout and thus it is
legitimate to drop their products from consideration on the purely tech argument that having
an unsupportable system[1] is a negative, thus unless there are other compelling arguments,
such as a large price/performace difference (possible at any particular time in the back and
forth pricing and model introduction cycles) the open competitor should be favored.

[1] This should not even be debatable but.... common sense being so uncommon these days.
People buy RHEL/SUSE contracts because they value support to the tune of hyndreds or thousands
of dollars, something that becomes of dubious value if an NVidia card in installed.  Unless
the NVidia solution's value add vs ATI/AMD exceeds the loss in value of the support contract,
basic economics says ditch NVidia.

I mostly agree with your statements: when you're in high-end stuff, things get complicated
between open source ideals and needed features/performance...  I was mostly in OpenGL
programming, and tried all three of big guys in last couple years.  Intel is very nice indeed,
but performance, as well as support for newer OpenGL features is lagging.  As for ATI, I was
long keeping a machine with Radeon 9000 around, and again open source driver was working
acceptably (not so good as Intel drivers, there were always a bug or two here and there), but
performance and support for newer features was not good.  I used ATI proprietary driver on a
machine with Radeon x200, and it was unacceptably buggy.  Eventually, after long avoiding it,
I ended up with a machine with an NVIDIA card, and proprietary driver of course, and I must
confess I am very happy so far - the performance is great, the driver is rock-solid, all the
new features are supported, and even CUDA, that I eventually got involved with, is very good
supported under Linux.  So, while it is indeed very disappointing to read above statements
from NVIDIA, at the moment I find it hard to think about switching to any of alternatives.

>Linux is actually stronger as a result of real companies putting billions of dollars into
research and development; this cannot be duplicated (yet) by open source efforts

It doesn't work that way anymore. and it hasn't for a long time.
Those billions of dollars by "real companies" are spend *on* open source efforts.

>and the resulting intellectual property has to be protected. 

Almost any discussion about "intellectual property" is meaningless. What *exactly* has to be
protected here ? It is important to be exact because, from a Free Software and open source
point of view, opinions might vary wildly depending on what exactly someone is referring to by
using the (often deliberately obtuse) term "intellectual property".

>Failing to recognize the basic economics of the situation will lead linux down the wrong
path.

How does "linux" fail to recognize the basic economics of the situation ?
As I understand it, it caters to many commercial interests and does so rather well.

> While most Linux software is complete garbage written by clueless idiots

OOPS troll alert -- don't feed the troll...

This sort of announcement is similar to the typical corporate "we have no plans to do X"
announcement immediately before doing X.  Corporations are not monoliths.  Often the faction
that controls PR is trying to use it to enforce their preference, and the announcement signals
a battle for influence.  If you are in a position of substantial purchasing power, you may be
able to tip the balance now if you communicate it clearly enough.

If you are a pragmatist then you should know that intel hardware actually works. No tweaking
required to get it working. It is certainly good enough for compiz and other basic OpenGL
stuff. AMD/ATI will have free drivers soon enough, hopefully, and then their hardware will
Just Work as well.

While it's appalling that display driver related crashes together make about 50 % of the
crashes, the number of crashes attributable to NVidia seems related to its popularity.

For instance, the Steam hardware survey grants lion's share to nvidia:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

If anyone knows a better data set, enlighten me...