This is so true. I know that people don’t want to switch to linux which only supports half of their hardware fully – it’s like buying an expensive device and using only features of a cheaper one. But hey, if you’re too much into proprietary world – why ever you need to use open sourced operating system?

“If a video card manufacturer has sufficient manpower to create a working video driver, I don’t see the point of duplicating the effort for the sake of Open Source. Be realistic, how many people have the sufficient knowledge to create a working drivers ? How many of them can create a optimized drivers ? How many of them can test it on a vast range of system ? How many of them can make them robust and more importantly trustfull ?
yes, not that much. So loosing time just for the sake of open source anything doesn’t mean anything really.”

There are lot’s of people who can do testing – some can do coding – it’s the whole idea of open source that many people can collaboratively make projects that could take thousands of working hours. But I’m not sure that you’ve quite understood what open source is about. The open source software is not good only for replacing the proprietory software – it really gives all power of hardware to user. Hardware manufacturer don’t have interests in developing drivers for products which are too old – so you are left with device that isn’t possibly supported at all. So you have to purchase a new device just to get support, although the old one would have been enough for your uses. If there would have been open source drivers life would have been easier. It’s all about freedom to do what ever you want and not to be locked with some companies software or hardware.

And as for the performance hit question, I’d accept perhaps around a 20% performance decrease.

I might be flammed for this but at this juncture I dont care. I have overall diminished respect for linux when I see geek’s proclamation and verbal attacks that if you dont use OSS your somehow a traitor or worse. This mentality is a disease and its high time it was stopped. We all get the principle behind ‘OSS’ , but come on its not realistic and I totally agree with djame. There are amazing OSS apps like GImp, blender etal and the dev work behind them is amazing,- but Let those that ‘own’ the hardware and are paid to work on the drivers do it ( nvidia or even ati ) and stop wasting precious OSS dev time for the sake of the almighty ego. Is it not better to ask nvidia for support for said older hardware than bother wasting time RE’ing things ? What is really to be gained by this OSS drive other than to say ‘oh kewl man we have oss driver’ ? Are there literally reports on file somewhere showing horrible bugs that nvidia has not fixed ?

If your that adament about using only OSS, then how about standing behind projects like:

http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php

cu
g.leej

Why write an open source 3D implementation of Total Annihilation when Warcraft 3 or Supreme Commander already exist? Why bother doing total conversion mods for Quake? How many people even know how to make a game?

I’d rather have a free video driver that works well than a proprietary video driver that works well. Even if there were only a handful of people out there who would support it on their own, I’d at least like the option of fixing it myself or paying someone else to fit it if something went wrong. Frankly, I’m tired of having to mess with my computer every time I upgrade a kernel. If it wasn’t for the proprietary drivers, I wouldn’t get apprehensive about upgrading the kernel each time.

I want to use my own hardware to the full extent possible. My understanding is that only the software engineers working next door with the hardware engineers on a 200+ million logic gate GPU have the knowledges and competence to provide me the most appropriate drivers for my video card. It’s not anymore a matter of enabling a paper jam switch. It’s much, much more complex.

I trust the writers of my drivers that they allow me to fully exploit the hardware I BOUGHT. Is their driver proprietary? It sucks, but the alternative is worse.