"In late August we started asking our readers for any questions they had for NVIDIA about Linux and this graphics company's support of open-source operating systems. Twelve pages worth of questions were accumulated and we finally have the answers to a majority of them. NVIDIA's Andy Ritger, who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team for workstation, desktop, and notebook GPUs, answered these questions. With that said, there are some great, in-depth technical answers and not the usual marketing speak found in many interviews."
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Member since:2009-05-20
Member since:2006-01-16
Member since:2009-03-17
Releasing the code would cost too much money, for the return they expect it is simply not worth it.
The majority of people simply want working drivers, especially with respect to the few people who keep on bitching about demanding proprietary information, only to either alienate vendors/developers or realize how over their heads a lot of the technical issues are and subsequently lose interest in the project leaving it to languish and to be forgotten by the inexorable advance of time...
Part of running a successful business consists on knowing how to prioritize things. It takes literally 5 minutes to get a Linux/BSD/solaris system up and running with NVIDIA drivers. To this day I have not seen a single open source zealot explain to me what the exact value proposition on having the proprietary code from NVIDIA would be, especially if you consider that NVIDIA literally defined 3D in Linux, and they are the main reason why there are people working on 3D linux modelling commercially.
Edited 2009-10-21 17:43 UTC
Member since:2006-04-10
This used to be true but Linux graphics are evolving at a very high speed now. You can even read in the interview that Nvidia can't keep up with linux because it just isn't a priority. Linux people expect more now. They want tight integration like kernel mode setting that is only possible with open source drivers.
Member since:2009-08-26
You are only allowed to reiterate the opinion that NVIDIA is a bastard for not wanting to open source their drivers.
Independent thought is unwelcome if it threatens FOSS ideology. Linux on the desktop has been a raging success without a stable abi. Over a decade in development and currently at 1%.
Well .64% to be exact:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-na-monthly-200809-200910
And to think that people in 1998 questioned if harassing hardware companies into open sourcing their drivers was a wise strategy.
Member since:
2006-01-02
Again, NVidia eludes the question why it doesn't release documentation: quote:
"Unfortunately the vast majority of our documentation is created solely for internal distribution. While at some point it may be possible to release some of this information in pubic form it would be quite a monumental effort to go through the vast amounts of internal documents and repurpose them for external consumption."
This is plain nonsense. Here, NVidia is just assuming that a majority of people are gullible and that the rest don't matter. Lame!
If you want to know why it's nonsense, consider that even if they really didn't have any documentation that's fit for a public release, they would still have the obvious possibility of letting a few employees write such documentation from scratch. We don't need all the super top secret features, only give us just as much as AMD/ATI is already giving, that'll do...
Edited 2009-10-20 22:51 UTC