On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 03:59:36AM -0900, Ethan Benson wrote: > On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 01:26:05PM +0100, Philipp Schulte wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 01:48:44AM -0200, Rogerio Brito wrote: > > > > > P.S.: On the other hand, people could make an organized initiative to > > > promote a petition to make NVidia aware of the Open Source movement > > > and ask thm for open drivers. > > > > > > Of course they are aware of Open Source, but a friendly reminder > > > together with signatures of lots of people (among which are potential > > > customers) is a great incentive for any company to change its mind. > > > > I once read a statement of an NVidia-guy who said that they would like > > to open their source code but they can't because of several NDA with > > other companys. > > Phil > > Rogerio's point still stands, NVidia's reasons for being Free Software > hostile are irrelevant and of no concern to me/us. My message to this > and other such companies is simple: if your hardware is not well > supported by Free software (meaning NO proprietary, kernels modules, > XF4 modules, libraries etc etc) then i will will take my business > elsewhere. I don't care what the excuse is, if they feel they need to > sign NDA's with some company that prevent them from properly > documenting the hardware or releasing driver source, that is fine but > that choice will cost them customers.
I did not try to justify this behaviour and I don't want to find excuses for it. I am glad that NVidia decided to release drivers at all but that of course is not enough. AFAIK there are not many companys that release Linux-drivers and so picking on NVidia might be ok but others deserve it much more. I hope that in the near future NVidia will produce new chips without NDAs and release free drivers (yes, call me naive). Phil
