J. B. Nicholson-Owens wrote: > Don Levey wrote: >> 1) Which card would this be? > > ATI Radeon 9000 AGP in this case. > Interesting... I have the 9600Pro, which I must assume is a different chipset. I haven't yet been successful in getting it to work under anything but the most basic 2D modes. I also can't find the 9600 AGP for anything less than about $110-120, but I'm probably not looking in the correct places. >> 2) How does this help the person who already has the NVIDIA card, >> apart from getting them to spend another $60? > > It shows them that they have to be careful about buying hardware to > work with XFree86. $50 or $60 is not a big deal in computers but > losing software freedom is. To people who haven't had it in the first place, the cost/benefit ratio may be different. What happens here, though, is that in their minds they lose the word "free" once they see "buy something else." > I can't convey the value of software > freedom by telling people to adopt non-free software. A more easily > used database of hardware (and a simple database lookup program to > run on Microsoft Windows and various free software OSes) would help > people not fall into the trap of obtaining hardware they can't use on > a particular free software system. > True. It needs to be easily used, and commonly used. By common, I mean more than the under-3% that now seem to use linux for desktop apps. At that point, major vendors can start to pay attention. But you're not telling people to "adopt" non-free software. You'd be helping people to get what they already have to work with free software. Sometimes that may require some non-free parts. That's life. The alternative is to say "tough luck, folks - the hardware you have won't work in this pure and unsullied environment, so your hardware must go." > What you're doing is purposefully constructing a narrow situation and > rejecting any response that doesn't match your response. You do this > to make people believe that your way is the only way to play these 3D > games. No, that's not what *I'm* doing. What I'm doing is going back to the original scenario that was posted. Someone already has certain hardware, and is trying to get it to run properly. I'm sorry you feel that the answer is "buy something else." Perhaps it's that technical support is what I do for a living, but that is NOT the way to help people. You help them by helping them with the fire first, and then fire prevention. You help them with the hardware they've got, and then say "when you're ready to get new hardware, here's what to look for." They get a working system, they know what to do next time, and there's an amount of goodwill that's been built up both for you and for free software. Why should someone who's got a working MS system even bother? Part of the attraction of Linux is that there is a significantly lower total cost of ownership. That gets erased when someone needs to purchase replacement hardware for pieces that are perfectly functional but do not fit into a purist view of what it "should" be. > I refuse to work within those silly boundaries. I > demonstrated that for a rather low fee one can purchase a great deal > of functionality without giving up software freedom. ...And instead they give up more money. It is your right not to work within those "silly boundaries." Of course, you're setting up "silly boundaries" of your own, but again that is your right. The individual with whom you spoke may have been unique in that most people would take away from this the lesson that free software costs more, and doesn't work as well. The price of zealotry is isolation; what you've also done for free software is to paint the picture that the rest of us advocates are zealots as well. Thanks a lot... -Don
