[geeks] PC question

[Frank Van Damme]

On Friday 21 February 2003 09:37, Kevin wrote:
> Understandable.  I on the other hand, have more of an 80s, if
> it works screw the ethics, view.  Taint my kernel all you
> want as long as it keeps ticking along.  And so far the closed
> source nvidia drivers work extremely well for me.

must... not... start... flamewar...

> They are most definitely not telling anyone what OS to
> run, as they do actually supply linux (and freebsd) drivers.
> Most card manufacturers don't even go that far.  It's not like
> the source for their Win32 drivers is wide open either.

That's the general Windows attitude. On Windows, I don't care as much as I 
should/would under linux, because it's hopeless anyway :)

> From my understanding they cannot open the source even if
> they wanted to do so due to technology that they license from
> another company, but i do not know if this is true or
> not.

Not entirely true. Ati has opensource linux drivers, as has Matrox. But ati 
has some things in their Windows drivers that they won't or can't tell the 
xfree86/dri developers about. Eg even in their FireGl drivers for linux, you 
find something called S3TC, which can't be in the opensource drivers becaue 
of license issues. nVidia could release enough about their cards to enable 
the 0,001% of users running BeOS to write an accelerated driver (or one that 
does 24 bit colors for that matter), but they don't. Nobody's gonna tell me 
that it is because of the technology edge they have over Ati :-)

> Just my two cents.

It's a matter of princilpe to me.

> /KRM



-- 
Frank Van Damme
http://www.openstandaarden.be