5,000+ Users For An Open NVIDIA

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 5,000+ Users For An Open NVIDIA

Just four days ago the OpenTheBlob.com letter to NVIDIA requesting open-source support was published and it already has in excess of 5,000 signatures. Most of these signatures are also accompanied by comments, after hitting the front-pages of Digg and Reddit...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NjM3Mg

[yoshi314]

i doubt nvidia will do anything. most companies don't care about petitions. as long as nvidia cards will sell nicely, they won't see any reason to change their linux attitude.

[deanjo]

i doubt nvidia will do anything. most companies don't care about petitions. as long as nvidia cards will sell nicely, they won't see any reason to change their linux attitude.

If they did I would have setup a online petition for free beer a decade ago.

[remm]

i doubt nvidia will do anything. most companies don't care about petitions. as long as nvidia cards will sell nicely, they won't see any reason to change their linux attitude.

They could care more when I buy an ATI 3870 rather than a GF 9600 however :) With price performance between the two being so close, the open source factor becomes very important to me.

[Baraclese]

I believe that petitions do have value, of course if only a hundred people signed it they wouldn't care but at 5000+ that's already alot. Without customers NVIDIA is nothing. They might not decide on 5000+ but let it come up again and again and it will stick to their consciousness. If no one bothered AMD with it they wouldn't have released their specs either, they did it because there was a demand. I don't think they have anything to loose, it's a win-win situation.

[deanjo]

I believe that petitions do have value, of course if only a hundred people signed it they wouldn't care but at 5000+ that's already alot.

5000 vocal users in four days gets drowned out by the 5000 reviews of performance of cards in windows on a daily basis.

Without customers NVIDIA is nothing. They might not decide on 5000+ but let it come up again and again and it will stick to their consciousness.

Don't kid yourself, if there wasn't money in binary blobs nVidia would drop support for alternative OS's. The thing is though is that money is not coming from in the desktop linux user. That money comes from commercial entities that just want a product to work. They do not care if it is opensource or not. Those companies are not the ones running bleeding edge kernels, compiz, etc etc.
The money for nvidia in linux is in the corporate sector.

If no one bothered AMD with it they wouldn't have released their specs either, they did it because there was a demand. I don't think they have anything to loose, it's a win-win situation.

AMD did that more for marketing then anything. They were hurting for some good PR after dropping the ball on the Phenom. To top it off they inheritated the FireGL line which at one time was considered the premiere highend workstation card. The FireGL's marketshare dropped of drastically with ATI's acquirement and they saw announcing opensource as a way of getting back some street credibility to an otherwise faltering line that has brought them ,little, if any, revenue since gaining the FireGL line. Most of the customers that used those products switched over to more stable solutions such as Nvidia's Quadro line.

[Michael]

OpenTheBlob hit the 6k mark this afternoon.

[Vadi]

Well, thanks to nVidia, Linux is making progress in Hollywood. That's a point to consider too.