Lonni J Friedman writes:
Which is the point that I made the last time this came up a few weeks ago. OSS doesn't mean that the support is any better than closed support. The two gentlemen who seem to be the most vocally against 'binary blob drivers' have no record that I can find in this list's archives of ever providing anyone with actual fixes for drivers. Nor
How many problems do you see posted here about the free drivers, for which a fix is needed?
All I see here is an endless stream of complaints about Nvidia's and ATI's non-free drivers. Problems with the other free drivers are a rarity. What does that tell you?
For my part -- since you seem to demand to see my credentials -- over the years I have logged of a handful of bugs in Bugzilla, concerning various bits and pieces regarding various video hardware, across an assortment Fedora beta releases, over many years. And, many of them eventually were resolved satisfactory. So I can confidently say that I've done my part -- as little as it might actually matter in the great scheme of things -- towards improving the state of free video drivers for Linux.
Furthermore, since I do have one laptop with an Nvidia chipset, the other day I did reconfigure X to load up Noveau, looked around, and left a few thoughts in X.org's Bugzilla. I'll try my best to provide useful feedback to Noveau's developers, and assist as much as I can. And if I do find myself with more free time than I do now, some hacking around is not entirely out of the question.
As little as I can do, I will do when it comes to free video drivers. But there's nothing that I can do when it comes to the non-free drivers.
that "the community" can help is little more than talk, as I've rarely seen any evidence that more than a very small number of people are able to actually fix bugs in any one driver anywhere.
It's not the raw number of people that can actually fix the code that matters. If you think that's the only metric that counts, you have a grave misunderstanding of the free software community.
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