http://www.michaeldolan.com/196 Linux, Law, Open Source, and a Comedy of Errors Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:41:55 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://www.michaeldolan.com/196/comment-page-1#comment-121 Michael Dolan Dot Com: Linux, Law, Open Source » YES! Open Source Graphics Drivers!!! From Intel though… Wed, 09 Aug 2006 22:50:21 +0000 http://www.michaeldolan.com/196#comment-121 [...] I’ve been very vocal in the past (and here) about the need for open source graphics drivers. It’s never made sense to me what the business strategy is for nVidia and ATI to come up with crazy methods for keeping their drivers proprietary and not distributable by the “free software” distributions (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian). Finally… someone listened to ME … or any of the other 10 millions Linux desktop users complaining for the last 5 years in public forums The common rationale is that these proprietary drivers contain the secrets to how the chips work… as if engineers can’t deduce what a chip is doing by how it’s laid out, the layers, etc??? They can come pretty close without the drivers… So while I may have had the easy street getting 3D XGL running on my laptop with nVidia drivers that worked with my system and distro versions, others got the shaft b/c they had to fight through getting his Intel’s proprietary video drivers to work with XGL. In the future, the positions may be reversed - if Intel gets its way. The Internet is littered with Linux “3D video card problems”. [...] [...] I’ve been very vocal in the past (and here) about the need for open source graphics drivers. It’s never made sense to me what the business strategy is for nVidia and ATI to come up with crazy methods for keeping their drivers proprietary and not distributable by the “free software” distributions (OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian). Finally… someone listened to ME … or any of the other 10 millions Linux desktop users complaining for the last 5 years in public forums The common rationale is that these proprietary drivers contain the secrets to how the chips work… as if engineers can’t deduce what a chip is doing by how it’s laid out, the layers, etc??? They can come pretty close without the drivers… So while I may have had the easy street getting 3D XGL running on my laptop with nVidia drivers that worked with my system and distro versions, others got the shaft b/c they had to fight through getting his Intel’s proprietary video drivers to work with XGL. In the future, the positions may be reversed – if Intel gets its way. The Internet is littered with Linux “3D video card problems”. [...]

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