Eh, no. Although license is a very big one. So big, AMD went for complete rewrite.
Nvidia also decides on their own, which features will users get and craps on their reactions. Thats the second point.
And their hardware is not universal one, like of AMD. And it became even more cut in Kepler - strictly gaming cards. Thats third.
And then,.. that old thing when they essentially bought out or bankrupted everyone except ati. Thats fourth.
But when you need good driver with good 3d and AMD gave crap (two years before),.. whats the choice left?..
Closed source intel windows driver is about 10% faster......
Not quite. Nvidia brought proprietary 3D to Linux, but we had free and for the most part open 3D drivers beforehand:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4152?page=0,0
So it would seem that a 4 year old promise is kept: the HD8000 series might be the first with launch-day support (or at least close). kudos guys. Starting a new driver from scratch with a 2 generation handicap, enabling older hardware along with new all the while enabling new features couldn't have been an easy task
No it's not done, no it's not 100% optimized, but the OSS driver is usable for basic tasks (talking about r600g, haven't tried radeonSI yet).
Serafean
More than just basic - it has certainly not slowed down my gaming any.
Have you tried to use the proprietary Catalyst (Crapitalist?) drivers with Linux? It's a constant pain in the rear. X gets updated, but Catalyst no longer works with X. So you try to install some new application and it needs some updated X functionality. One of two things happens. Either a new version of X gets installed, and lo and behold X is broken. Or you simply cannot upgrade. But let's set aside the many technical problems with proprietary drivers for a moment.
Proprietary software is ethically wrong. It's holding back the progress of mankind. Think about how much faster technology progresses when software is done out in the open.
Also, it is naive to think that proprietary software is about gettings things for free. Programmers get paid to write free software. People buy hardware that is supported by free software. And companies sell support for free software. Free in this context is about freedom, not about price.
-ed.