Re:Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds
by cookiecaper on Saturday June 16, 2012 @10:50PM
(#4122078)
I haven't checked recently but nVidia also used to provide decent support for FreeBSD and Solaris.
Perhaps. Now what about OpenBSD and NetBSD, or whatever else? If they provide specs then they don't have to write drivers, but they don't get to bless or withhold their blessing.
There was a stink a while back where Adaptec had been providing drivers for FreeBSD, but then stopped. People were stuck either not upgrading their boxes (bad!) or moving off their RAID setup (painful, expensive!). It's ugly. With specs, there is not this issue.
The (pervasive) idea that vendors providing drivers for your system of choice, for the time being is being open source friendly is something the vendor promotes, but it's not actually friendly.
It's not really incongruent. Nvidia has provided driver support for Linux, but that does no good for, say, FreeBSD. This driver support is in lieu of providing specs. They're keeping a lid on things and maintaining control. There are very good hackers who would make open source drivers if they had specs. Arguably less buggy drivers. Since they make sure they have control it's not surprising that they either 1) think this isn't worth their trouble, or 2) have actively decided they don't want this to happen, for whatever business reason.