[COLUG] Video Cards

[Rob Funk]

Ben Gladwell wrote:
> On 23/06/08 14:35 -0400, Phil Cuellar wrote:
> > it's a shame that NVIDIA isn't playing nice with Linux as it's been
> > my experience that they have better and more reliable hardware than
> > ATI. Just about every hard-core gamer I know swears by NVIDIA, and
> > many (including me) have had the occasion to swear at ATI Radeon
> > cards....
>
> It depends on what you mean by 'playing nice'.  nvidia's proprietary
> driver works good and actually has some performance advantages over the
> Windows driver as I recall.
>
> Its just not open.

"Just not open" is extremely important.  Consider the following statement 
released yesterday:

| Position Statement on Linux Kernel Modules
| June 2008 
|
| We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source
| Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable. We have
| repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and
| the greater Linux ecosystem. Such modules negate the openness,
| stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development
| model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux
| community. Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their
| customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors.
| Therefore, in order to take full advantage of the cost savings and
| shared support benefits open source has to offer, we urge vendors to
| adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source
| kernel code.           
|
| We speak only for ourselves, and not for any company we might work for
| today, have in the past, or will in the future.
|
| Dave Airlie  Jens Axboe  Ralf Baechle  Muli Ben-Yehuda  Jiri Benc
| Arnd Bergmann  Vitaly Bordug  James Bottomley  Josh Boyer  Neil Brown
| Mark Brown  David Brownell  Michael Buesch  Franck Bui-Huu  Adrian Bunk
| Ralph Campbell  Mauro Carvalho Chehab  Denis Cheng  Jonathan Corbet
| Glauber Costa  Alan Cox  Magnus Damm  Ahmed S. Darwish  Robert P. J. Day
| Hans de Goede  Helge Deller  Jean Delvare  Mathieu Desnoyers
| Alexey Dobriyan  Daniel Drake  Alex Dubov  Randy Dunlap
| Michael Ellerman  Pekka Enberg  Jan Engelhardt  Mark Fasheh
| J. Bruce Fields  Larry Finger  Jeremy Fitzhardinge  Mike Frysinger
| Kumar Gala  Robin Getz  Liam Girdwood  Thomas Gleixner  Brice Goglin
| Cyrill Gorcunov  Andy Gospodarek  Thomas Graf  Krzysztof Halasa
| Harvey Harrison  Stephen Hemminger  Michael Hennerich  Tejun Heo
| Benjamin Herrenschmidt  Kristian Høgsberg  Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
| Marcel Holtmann  Mike Isely  Takashi Iwai  Olof Johansson  Dave Jones
| Jesper Juhl  Matthias Kaehlcke  Kenji Kaneshige  Jan Kara  Jeremy Kerr
| Russell King  Olaf Kirch  Roel Kluin  Hans-Jürgen Koch  Auke Kok
| Peter Korsgaard  Jiri Kosina  Mariusz Kozlowski  Greg Kroah-Hartman
| Michael Krufky  Aneesh Kumar  Clemens Ladisch  Christoph Lameter
| Gunnar Larisch  Grant Likely  John W. Linville  Yinghai Lu  Tony Luck
| Pavel Machek  Matt Mackall  Paul Mackerras  Roland McGrath
| Patrick McHardy  Kyle McMartin  Paul Menage  Thierry Merle  Eric Miao
| Akinobu Mita  Ingo Molnar  James Morris  Andrew Morton  Paul Mundt
| Oleg Nesterov  Luca Olivetti  Pierre Ossman  Venkatesh Pallipadi
| Nick Piggin  Nicolas Pitre  Evgeniy Polyakov  Richard Purdie
| Mike Rapoport  Sam Ravnborg  Gerrit Renker  Stefan Richter
| David Rientjes  Stefan Roese  Francois Romieu  Stephen Rothwell
| Maciej W. Rozycki  Mark Salyzyn  Yoshinori Sato  Deepak Saxena
| Holger Schurig  Amit Shah  Yoshihiro Shimoda  Sergei Shtylyov
| Kay Sievers  Sebastian Siewior  Alexey Starikovskiy  Alan Stern
| Hirokazu Takata  Eliezer Tamir  Eugene Teo  Doug Thompson
| FUJITA Tomonori  Dmitry Torokhov  Marcelo Tosatti  Steven Toth
| Theodore Tso  Geert Uytterhoeven  Arjan van de Ven  Ivo van Doorn
| Wim Van Sebroeck  Hans Verkuil  Dmitri Vorobiev  Anton Vorontsov
| Daniel Walker  Johannes Weiner  Dan J. Williams  Darrick J. Wong
| David Woodhouse  Chris Wright  Bryan Wu  Rafael J. Wysocki  Herbert Xu
| Vlad Yasevich  Peter Zijlstra  Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz


For more details:
  http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Device_driver_statement


-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"