On Sun, 2005-10-30 at 10:10, Derek Martin wrote:
> >
> > But (rightly or wrongly) video card makers consider these two pieces of
> > information to be their competitive edge. So you are not likely to see
> > them releasing either, at least for their latest cards. Also, Linux users
> > still aren't a very large fraction of their customer base.
>
> I'm well aware of the reasons... But support for their hardware (or
> rather usability of it) suffers because of them.
If you are going to assign blame here, consider that there are
several parties involved in creating this problem and that
other popular OS's do not cause end-user problems by refusing
to include vendor-supplied binaries. Nvidia can't legally change
their position no matter how much the GPL crowd wants to pretend
that it is their fault.
> As for what fraction of their customer base uses Linux, those are some
> statistics I'd like to see... But I think it raises some interesting
> questions, like what percentage of their users actually use both? What
> percentage of Linux users who DON'T use their hardware would switch if
> there were native drivers?
But they do make an effort to provide native drivers.
> > It also would be a small task if there were standards that allowed them to
> > write a single installer that would work with any distribution, without
> > having to deal with loads of special cases.
>
> This is largely impossible. In this case we're dealing with the
> kernel, so the reasons are slightly different (but very similar) than
> for application programs.
The reason here is not technical.
> The kernel is very actively developed.
Is that an excuse for not freezing a driver api so vendors can
supply optimized drivers that don't have to be re-written every
few months? Other OS's have managed to solve this problem.
> The distribution vendors often
> make their own custom modifications, to enhance functionality or
> performance, or just to fix bugs. For a hardware vendor to maintain
> its own binary-only driver which is compatible with all of these
> varying kernels is a task which is, practically speaking, essentially
> impossible. So, from time to time, with various kernels, their driver
> will crash your system.
If you follow the fedora list you'd be well aware that crashes happen
as a result of a lot of the other drivers as well. You can't
blame that all on vendor binaries.
> I guess I do not "blame" them for wanting to keep their trade secrets,
> but when the newest release of their drivers crashes your system, the
> above is the direct cause, even if you can argue that the "fault"
> isn't theirs... The only practical solution is for them to release
> the code, whether or not they are willing to do so.
Or use an OS with a more stable design...
> > Nevertheless, I've found that the NVIDIA drivers work reasonably well.
>
> Usually. Unless they crash your system, which happens from time to
> time, i.e. this was not the first time.
But you can say that about a lot of other drivers too. I crash
regularly if I try to run raid with a firewire drive included
and that's all built from source, no one else to blame.
> > You could also "blame" Red Hat and Fedora for their policy of not
> > including proprietary/binary-only packages in their distributions.
>
> No, I think you really can't; in many cases (if not all) it is illegal
> for them to do so, which is a large part of why they don't do it.
I don't think that has anything to do with their choice not to do it.
> Even if it is not illegal in your country, it might be in many
> others... Their hands are tied.
How would other OS's be able to include drivers if it were
illegal to distribute vendor supplied binaries?
> > I admire them for sticking to their guns on this issue, but it does
> > affect usability, particularly with respect to cartain hardware
> > drivers and multimedia codecs.
>
> Which are illegal for them to redistribute, because they are
> proprietary. Or, they would have to pay licensing fees in some cases,
> which means they would have to charge you (more) for their products.
> I agree this is inconvenient, but I'd much rather suffer some
> inconvenience than see Red Hat sued out of existence... Don't you
> agree? :-)
Being proprietary doesn't automatically make it illegal to
redistribute. That depends on the license supplied by the
copyright holder, and you need to separate the cases in your
argument above. I can understand RedHat not including outside
binaries even if they are legal to redistribute in their
supported products since it might add problems that they would
be unable to solve (at least if they have the hubris to think
they would be better than the vendor at this...). It doesn't make
any sense other than some kind of political statement in an
unsupported product like fedora, though. And for the things
that are freely available but can't be redistributed, the
distribution could include push-button scripts to pull the
required files from their home sites, letting the end user
respond to any needed click-through agreements.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
