Fedora Users — Re: ATI video comes out of the closet

Re: ATI video comes out of the closet

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Microsoft sells software. Evey user of OpenOffice is one less user of MS Office. Nvidia sells hardware, and gives the software drivers away for free as far as I know. Linux users of open source drivers cost Nvidia nothing, and may represent a hardware sale they would not otherwise have gotten. Thus, there is significant motivation for Microsoft to sabotage OpenOffice, and none that I can see for Nvidia to do the same to open source drivers.

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.