Chromatic on Video Drivers - Opinion

[Vlad]

        On the article... great, another person that hasn't heard of
patents and intellectual property. Most of OpenGL (and GLX) is covered
under patents, intellectual property laws, and possibly trade secrets.
As an aside, I'll note that a lot of said patents and IP has been
transferred by SGI to Microsoft over the years.
        You can not get a full open source implementation of OpenGL
and GLX that is hardware accelerated (emphasis on that) and that uses
extensions, without violating someone's IP. For example, see the
issues with the GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc call. Just about every
game out there made in the last few years needs S3TC to work, and
you'll only get that from a closed source, binary driver like
nVidia's. (Or ATI's, these days.)

        It is not the video card manufacturer's choice whether to open
source a driver or not; they are not permitted by their licensing
terms, in order to get that DirectX and OpenGL certification. (And no,
not getting the cert, but implementing said calls and releasing an
open source driver is NOT the solution here; they'll be hung out to
try, after having unspeakable things done to them by teams of
lawyers.)

        As for part b), nVidia is the only real choice. I've been
using nVidia cards for many years now, and their drivers are quite
excellent. (Go full hardware acceleration on FreeBSD and Solaris 10!)
Sure, ATI have cleaned up their act lately, but it's just not enough
by now. Plus they've soured a fair amount of people with their initial
driver releases, some of which were spectacular failures, depending on
what hardware/Kernel you ran.


        -- Vlad

On 7/26/06, William O'Higgins Witteman <william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Has anyone else read this?
>
> http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/07/appeasement_isnt_working.html
>
> I have been thinking about this very topic recently, when investigating a
> new video card with DVI, and I was interested in gathering other
> opinions.  The general premise is that there are very, very few choices
> of video cards that have full, free (as in FLOSS) 3D support.  The
> article is a call to arms to write to video card manufacturers and make
> them understand that they are losing sales because they are not
> publishing their specs so that the OS community can develop drivers.
>
> His point is that by running binary blobs for video support we
> compromise our systems and (possibly) our ethics.  I tend to agree, but
> I don't really want to run an Intel CPU, so using an on-board Intel
> video card is not an option I am excited about.
>
> Does anyone else have an opinion on a) the article or b) which
> DVI-enabled video card with 3D acceleration you would buy if you were in
> the market?
> --
>
> yours,
>
> William
>
>
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