[Gllug] Linux graphics card

[Tethys]

Christian Smith writes:

>To be fair to the likes of NVidia, they probably have a lot of cross
>licensed code in the drivers which would prohibit them from open sourcing
>the drivers in a useful way. They are also bound by license agreements.

Nope, they've already claimed that they have full rights to their source
code, and could release it if they chose to do so. But they don't because
they believe it would lose them their competitive advantage[1].

Actually, I couldn't care less whether ATI or Nvidia'a drivers are open
source or not. What I care about is that the programming information is
openly documented. That, to me, is a better solution than wading through
someone else's source code to work out what's going on anyway[2]. The
X/DRI developers have a good track record of writing decent drivers, so
long as they're given suitable documentation for the card...

Tet

[1] Not that they have one any more. By all accounts, ATI are beating them
    both in terms of bang/buck and also outright performance these days.
[2] Of course, the supplied source could be of such high quality that this
    isn't an issue. But having seen a lot of so called "commercial quality"
    code, I doubt it...
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