Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

Prior to launching their next-generation graphics processors, NVIDIA dropped their obfuscated open-source driver and have said they will not provide any open-source support at all for their GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" series as they just recommended their customers use the X.Org VESA driver until they can install the official binary Linux driver. However, the community developers working on the Nouveau driver project still plan to support the GeForce GTX 470/480 graphics cards via clean-room reverse engineering. Today their efforts might be helped thanks to a hardware sponsorship...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODE4Mg

[cl333r]

...as the Mesa/Gallium3D stack is still trying to catch-up to the OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2 specifications.

And I hope OpenGL 3.3 too.
Also, I hope PathScale won't be handing out free video-cards to anyone who claims he's a open-source (GPU) developer without checking that info first as otherwise the freeloaders would be the first to benefit.

[whizse]

The offer clearly states:

If you're interested please contact me offlist with a brief description
of your background, the contributions you made to open source and what
you'd intend to do with the card.

so I doubt there's any risk of freeloaders.

[droidhacker]

Given the power consumption of those horrid monsters, you can NOT call this "free". Those beasts will run you broke just in electricity costs!

[bulletxt]

This is quite a shame for NVIDIA. They don't want to deliver open source drivers? Ok..... but they sure can send free cards to the nouveau developers.

[DeepDayze]

This is quite a shame for NVIDIA. They don't want to deliver open source drivers? Ok..... but they sure can send free cards to the nouveau developers.

And along with the hands off approach including not providing any assistance nor hindering the project nVidia is going to be on the short end of the stick.

At least PathScale is doing a service helping out the nouveau developers with this project

[nanonyme]

And along with the hands off approach including not providing any assistance nor hindering the project nVidia is going to be on the short end of the stick.

At least PathScale is doing a service helping out the nouveau developers with this project

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.

[DeepDayze]

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.

Agree...and perhaps this is a signal to nvidia to be a little more open if they want to keep their market share

[codestr0m]

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.

Companies frequently do charity, but the lack of visibility could sometimes lead those not looking in the right places to miss it. Regardless of that I will say there's strong benefit to us and hopefully everyone with Nvidia hardware for what we're trying to accomplish. We realize these cards are relatively expensive still and that getting them in the hands of eager developers could help bolster work for not only Fermi but all Nvidia cards. I should also note that we have pre-alpha compute drivers for OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. Our focus is open source and not just Linux. Open source drivers may not drive revenue, but I think it'll help us deliver a higher quality product. Mostly, I'm just sick of my Nvidia drivers crashing on OpenSolaris and can't wait to send a patch to fix it (jk)

[Delgarde]

Companies frequently do charity, but the lack of visibility could sometimes lead those not looking in the right places to miss it.

That, and a tendency of many to see corporate charity as nothing but an attempt to buy good press.

Which may often be true, but those people forget that corporations are run by humans, who may have genuinely charitable reasons for what they do. It's not *always* a cynical attempt to exploit the masses...