"If Linus would get off his high horse about closed source drivers"

... 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.

But his stance actually makes us much MORE beholden to the 3rd parties. If every minor kernel version didn't require the vendors to recompiled drivers, and quite possible change code because Linus changed the ABI again, that would result in more hardware working better for more people.

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

I don't think reality bears this out. Now that Broadcom has come to their senses, NVIDIA is pretty much the only major consumer device vendor in the PC space with binary blob drivers. Everyone else has, ultimately, folded in the face of pressure from the dogmatists. I think Linus is pretty much winning, and the fact that NVIDIA is feeling pressure here is a good thing.

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).

Broadcom OTOH still has crappy ARM SoCs that require binary blobs. Just like most ARM GPUs that run on Linux.

What about ATI?

Didn't AMD release a ton of documentation for their GPUs specifically so that the open source radeon drivers could become a realistic option when using their GPUs?

Nobody I know with an AMD GPU uses the propriety fglrx drivers.

Open source 3D drivers will have a hard time EVER being useable for anything beyond glgears... everything in that space is going to be really patent encumbered.

Frankly, if you are looking to play games than you are wasting your time with any of the available GPU/driver combinations on Linux.

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.

> working KMS

Something that NVIDIA refuses to support :)

Fortunately most of the world don't care about software patents :)

Pragmatism is running Windows. Or Mac OS X. There's people that prefer it this way on Linux.

Which is what I mostly do these days.

Having an unstable, internal kernel interface has nothing to do with being opposed to closed source drivers. Linus' problem is when people bitch and moan when things change and it breaks closed source drivers. He's repeatedly said that anything internal is fair game to change. If your driver is in the kernel it will be fixed if the interface changes; if it's closed then you better keep up on your own.