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This is great. The more governments, companies, and other organizations demand open-source drivers from their hardware vendors, the greater the benefit will be

by cs702 14y ago

This is great. The more governments, companies, and other organizations demand open-source drivers from their hardware vendors, the greater the benefit will be to society. Virtually everyone benefits from more hardware devices being more compatible and easier to integrate with each other.

rplnt 14y ago
The didn't demand openness. The article is sensational. > The problem is that the GeForce / Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). Nothing about being open.
Silhouette 14y ago
Openness is great, other things being equal, but in the graphics card market other things certainly aren't equal. A huge amount of R&D goes into the drivers rather than the cards themselves, because better drivers offer a substantial commercial advantage over the competition. If that advantage is reduced -- or even becomes a liability -- because you gave away the secrets that you spent a lot of time and money learning, then there is no longer any reason to spend that time and money in the first place, and not even your own drivers will benefit. This is the problem with almost any Internet debate about intellectual property or open development processes. It's easy to see the benefit tomorrow if you just force everything open today, but you have to consider the implications for next week as well. In this particular case, a lot of people are calling NVIDIA names and assuming they're being stupid. It's entirely possible that they have competent management who have looked at the loss for this one deal, balanced it against the ongoing loss of disclosing their proprietary driver techniques without an adequate level of control, and simply decided that it wasn't a good deal. Sure, it's 10,000,000 "lost" sales, but the global PC market alone ships upwards of 300,000,000 units every year, so this deal isn't even close to big enough to reshape the industry.

by cs702 14y ago

rplnt 14y ago

The didn't demand openness. The article is sensational. > The problem is that the GeForce / Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). Nothing about being open.

Silhouette 14y ago

Openness is great, other things being equal, but in the graphics card market other things certainly aren't equal. A huge amount of R&D goes into the drivers rather than the cards themselves, because better drivers offer a substantial commercial advantage over the competition. If that advantage is reduced -- or even becomes a liability -- because you gave away the secrets that you spent a lot of time and money learning, then there is no longer any reason to spend that time and money in the first place, and not even your own drivers will benefit. This is the problem with almost any Internet debate about intellectual property or open development processes. It's easy to see the benefit tomorrow if you just force everything open today, but you have to consider the implications for next week as well. In this particular case, a lot of people are calling NVIDIA names and assuming they're being stupid. It's entirely possible that they have competent management who have looked at the loss for this one deal, balanced it against the ongoing loss of disclosing their proprietary driver techniques without an adequate level of control, and simply decided that it wasn't a good deal. Sure, it's 10,000,000 "lost" sales, but the global PC market alone ships upwards of 300,000,000 units every year, so this deal isn't even close to big enough to reshape the industry.