On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Bruce Byfield wrote:
On Thu, 2007-06-09 at 16:55 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
While good, it's still not as good as having proper open-source drivers
supported by the manufacturer as well as the community.
The Noveau driver project faces the same unfortunate situation with Nvidia as
the OpenOffice folks do when reverse-engineering the MS doc format: there is
nothing stopping Nvidia from making a few "improvements" that will break the
Noveau drivers more-or-less at will.
Counterpoint: The community is more strongly motivated to keep the
drivers current than the manufacturer. And, given the FOSS community's
strong record with reverse-engineering, I doubt that Nvidia will keep
ahead of Nouveau for any length of time once the basic drivers are done.
Depends. For basic operation, yes. But there are a couple of patented
bits in OpenGL that nVIDIA supports. Is Nouveau going to support those as
well? I don't know how many apps depend on those pieces, but it could be
an issue depending on what fails to work.
Personally I have a bit problem with patents incorporated into standards.
Please insert screaming rant here.
--
Refrigerator Rule #1: If you don't remember when you bought it, Don't eat it.
