NVIDIA 180.51 Display Driver Released

[krazy]

That's not evidence, that's speculation and still does not justify calling them "evil".
Seriously, don't use wikipedia for "evidence".

See the citations.

I didn't call them evil, but they certainly haven't been helpful to the open source community. Of course they're under no obligation to be and are currently doing a stellar job of supporting their product under linux.

But if one day nvidia decides there's no money in linux desktop drivers then there's no free alternative and we're all screwed (I've got a nvidia card too).

See Oracle's recent takeover of Sun for example - what's going to happen to OpenOffice or MySQL? Maybe they'll keep supporting them, maybe not. But it doesn't matter so much because they're open source and therefore forkable if someone wants to maintain them.

So, seriously, I hope NVidia keeps doing what they're doing. Maybe one day ATI will catch up, but for now, it doesn't seem likely.

Exactly. "I hope" and "for now" are the key words.

[deanjo]

See the citations.

Have you actually read them?

It's speculation from a set of people that love to give doomsday scenario's.

But if one day nvidia decides there's no money in linux desktop drivers then there's no free alternative and we're all screwed (I've got a nvidia card too).

"if" is the key word. What "if" nobody picks up and maintains a abandoned piece of code? Same thing. This isn't the Minority Report where you are guilty before you even commit a crime but that's sure what the foss'rs like to make it sound like. Nvidia could just as easily say "OK we give up maintaining them, here is the code".

See Oracle's recent takeover of Sun for example - what's going to happen to OpenOffice or MySQL? Maybe they'll keep supporting them, maybe not. But it doesn't matter so much because they're open source and therefore forkable if someone wants to maintain them.

Again HUGE "ifs", let's at least have a dead body before screaming murder.

[jonnycat26]

haven't been helpful[/URL] to the open source community. Of course they're under no obligation to be and are currently doing a stellar job of supporting their product under linux.

Didn't they give the community VDPAU? With no strings attached?

[deanjo]

Didn't they give the community VDPAU? With no strings attached?

But, but, but, it's nvidia, it has to be evil. That code screams N.W.O.

[greg]

Ignoring the fact that AMD pays people to work on the open source drivers..

Which is my point. Without AMD and Novell paying the developers, we wouldn't have any driver. It's exactly the same as with NVidia. Whether the drivers are open source or closed source doesn't really matter much.
And you can't quite compare GPU driver programming with regular application development. It's very unlikely that someone will be able to easily continue someone else's work here.

[Kano]

Well in some case Nvidia drivers are really bad, when it comes to old gpus which do not have got a 3d capable driver for newer Xservers. Newer gpus are much better supported - compared to fglrx they support much more legacy cards with full featured drivers, but of course the development is only done on the latest cards. Sometimes i think that ati prepares for elimiation because they focus so much on oss drivers. In the later future nobody will need gfx cards anyway.

[bridgman]

Sometimes i think that ati prepares for elimiation because they focus so much on oss drivers.

Ok, I have to admit, that was good

[deanjo]

Sometimes i think that ati prepares for elimiation because they focus so much on oss drivers.

I think I saw a 1080p x264 torrent on demonoid about that....