Opinion: NVIDIA drivers are a Good Thing [tm]

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Mon May 17 16:45:42 UTC 2004


On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:27:57PM +0100, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:

> If you're ready to accept a bad solution you'll hardly ever get the good
> one, and in this case never since it is near to impossible (for
> technical reasons) to have good and/or complete Free Software drivers
> for NVIDIA cards at the moment.

Both ATI and nVidia own enough patents (IP weapons of mass destruction, so to
speak) in 3d rendering acceleration to assure complete annihilation of anyone provably
violating those. 

This mutually assured destruction stalemate very effectively prevents 
any of the parties volunteering with opensourcing their drivers, and 
in fact allows any open source drivers infringing on above IP 
(clean-room reverse engineered, or not: try to prove a negative to anyone
with deeper pockets than you, in court) to be destroyed by litigation.

Unless open source developers are granted special protection from persecution
of IP violation, the open source development is increasingly either shackled, or
forced into gray zones, or outright illegality</ianal>.

Still, better binary-only (buggy, breaking at each kernel upgrade) 
accelerated drivers instead no accelerated drivers at all.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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