Opinion: NVIDIA drivers are a BAD Thing [tm]

[Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 04:21:10PM -0400, Luc Bouchard wrote:
....

> You are forgetting one thing here Sean, economies of scale.  Let's
> assume that NVIDIA makes 1 million cards per year.  Let's be
> generous and say that 5% of those cards end up in Linux boxes (and
> I'm being VERY generous with that number).  Then let's say that 50%
> of those machines are run by people that are principled in thought
> and would only use Open Source drivers.  This means that NVIDIA
> engineers need to make a business case to management and share
> holders to satisfy 25,000 clients out of 1 million.

Hmm.... business case.
The best way to be measured as a Linux user with nVidia hardware
is to download their hardware driver and install or attempt to
install their driver.

If you are a pure Open Source type of person you might elect to to
only use the OpenS nv driver but do download+install the closed driver
anyhow.

I coach you to go through the motions of installing the closed source
version for a reason.  That reason is that there is no other better
way for measures of nVidia-hardware+Linux to be made by nVidia.

The FC2 testers know that FC2+nVidia is currently a noconnect however
if you look at the installers actions it attempts to collect a driver
for 2.6.xxxx from the nVidia ftp site.  This can be measured, so be counted...

As some insiders have noted the active authors of the nv drivers are
inside of nVidia.  They have access to the interesting bits and given
the relentless improvement of that driver things are opening up.

I have gone back and spent $$ on nVidia hardware for two reasons.
  a) there is an open source driver that works.
  b) the closed source driver is excellent.
  i.e. they do support Linux on a par with other OS.





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