[ILUG] OT: PCI TV tuner card for 50 bills

[Paul Jakma]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, David Giles wrote:

> I knew that :-) 

Ah oops. I parsed that as you saying "maybe ATi will follow NVidia 
and release open drivers".

> If you substitute binary for closed source above you will see what
> I meant. The ready availability of the binary driver is beneficial
> to nvidia's sales.

Not really, because the set of linux users who would buy NVidia cards 
based on binary driver (only) availibility is a subset of the users 
who would buy if an open driver available.

Though, what the ratio is, i dont know. I suspect it tends to 100%
than 0%.

> Though I do acknowledge that my reasoning is probably flawed: ATI
> instead of saying 'Hey if we release the specs for our drivers, we
> will get increased sales in the open-source market' will say 'Lets
> copy nvidia's lead and release binary drivers, that will keep 'em
> happy'.

Ah, but you miss a piece of history. ATi _did_ have open drivers. The
Weather Channel in the USA wanted to shift from expensive SGI's to
cheap PCs running Linux, but needed 3D support on Linux. ATi had just
released the Radeon, so the Weather Channel commisioned open drivers
to be written, by Precision Insight, for which ATi made the specs
available. That's why the R1xx based ATi cards (Radeon 7xxx and most
of the 8xxx and one of the 9xxxx (the 9100?) as well as the R1xx
FireGL)) have fully supported open drivers for 2D and 3D.

However, for the R2xx (ie mostly the Radeon 9xxx's and up), ATi
followed NVidia's lead and released binary drivers only, no specs.

It's sad, but pragmatism, ie "i just want to be able to use the
expensive video card that came with my machine", just ends up 
shooting us in the foot in the long term.

Eg, How do you run x86 binary drivers on one of those really nice new 
Apple G5 PPC machines? No amount of cajoling is going to make x86 
code run on PPC. (other than by slow emulation).

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
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