It is refreshingly blunt, i'll give them that.
* The architecture of our driver did not fit with the subsystem we were playing in (this was a SCSI module). We worked with the package maintainers, and without a near complete re-write of our code, it would not have been accepted.
* Part of the above design was cause by cross-platform code we had (parts of the driver was shared between Windows, Linux, AIX, others).
* When supporting customers that run older version of a distro, there would be no-way to give them the latest features if the code was part of the kernel. So our latest product offerings would be incompatible with older systems. We would have been at the mercy of RedHat and SUSE to backport our drivers into their older releases. (or would have had to pay them a lot of money to do it).
We had a driver that basically started development in 1997 or so, that there was no-way we were going to rewrite it just to get it into the linux kernel.
For us, it was just way cheaper to supply the drivers outside of the kernel.
While that's certainly fair enough, and rational in economic terms, when a user base reads between the lines that "you're not worth spending the money to do things properly", I can also see it eliciting a more visceral and less rational response such as Linus'. I think that in any case though, money isn't the issue so much as Nvidia wanting to not share their toys.
Unfortunately, "Yeah, so what?" is not the kind of PR you want here. This was an opportunity to go "Yes, that's how it is now, but in the future, we're planning on supporting all this wonderful stuff on Linux!"
Instead, it's an advertisement for ATI/AMD's Linux support.
So, I'd still take ATI over nVidia due to ATI's much better Open Source drivers with some development done by ATI, though I'd take Intel over ATI for having entirely Open Source drivers with much more direct development from Intel.
And yet, the performance is still an order of magnitude worse than the proprietary driver (last time I bothered to compare them, anyway).
Linux support is another level of shitty in comparison.
This is right in line with 'we support our customers/users' not whatever the Linux kernel guys feel like doing today.
So sure, if "customers/users" includes the only handful of 3D content shops out there running linux toolchains, and not the millions of people buying NVIDIA-enabled laptops, I guess it makes sense. But for everyone else it kinda sucks.
Hardly. NVIDIA says they "made a decision to support Linux on our GPUs by leveraging NVIDIA common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure." HN responder says that's bullshit since they finally support RandR. I point out RandR is not 'Linux common infrastructure' but a Xorg technology and supporting that is very literally "supporting Linux ... by leveraging NVIDIA common code" because the NVIDIA common code is targeting Xorg technologies and not Linux specific ones.
Then you move the point to something completely different.
NVIDIA is clearly not interested in providing any Linux only support. Don't expect them to support anything under Linux that isn't also common to other platforms they support.
(FreeBSD has commited to support for both, btw).
I have an Optimus laptop (Thinkpad W520) and that's not really true. The problem is that you can't run both the Intel and NVidia chips at the same time without it being a PITA. If I want to use my internal display while I'm on the road, I move my NVidia Xorg.conf out of the way and it's fine. I'm not saying it's optimal, but it definitely works.
Is it? If my computer boots up directly to X anyway, why do I care about a framebuffer beyond the standard vesa stuff?
PS: If Linus would get off his high horse about closed source drivers, and commit to have at least a somewhat stable ABI, that would do more for hardware support on linux than 1000 years of ranting and moaning, which if anything, will only alienate the hardware makers even more.
... then he would be Microsoft and Apple, and not an Open Source operating system developer, maintainer, producer, and evangelist. All his years of working openly and freely will be squandered and his life's work beholden to closed-source, closed spec device manufacturers.
Live the open source dream if it makes you feel good. I live in a world where if it doesn't work, I couldn't care less about it.
Pragmatism > Dogma
Do you have any examples of situations where this is making us "MORE" beholden to third parties? I honestly don't see many (though in the SoC space, the PVR drivers are a very similar situation).
Nobody I know with an AMD GPU uses the propriety fglrx drivers.
If that's not what you are after, then I don't know what more than working KMS and enough "umph" to run a compositing window manager you could need.
Something that NVIDIA refuses to support :)
Basically, they recognize that they don't support DRI2/KMS, or libva, or hybrid graphics. And they don't care. They think their stuff works better for them and the customers they care about. And they don't expect this to change.
I guess I can respect that, even if I disagree.
(Then they go into PR mode in the final point, arguing that NVIDIA has contributed lots and lots of Linux patches for the Tegra SoCs, which is obviously true but irrelevant to the controversy.)