[clug] Internode dumps FOSS for MS Exchange

[Alex Satrapa]

On 18/02/2010, at 23:23 , Paul Wayper wrote:

> That's why nVidia will pay developers to maintain the nouveau driver.  Because
> at some stage it's going to be cheaper for them to do that - at least to
> support some of the platforms they want to support - than to pay developers to
> try to maintain the proprietary drivers which aren't as well supported because
> they're lagging behind the kernel, and so forth.

No no no… you don't understand what I was saying.

nVidia will see that it's paying developers to write drivers for Linux, but the community is ditching those drivers like yesterday's radioactive waste and using Nouveau drivers instead - which were written for free by the nVidia using Linux community.

What nVidia will see here is that the cheapest way to get Linux drivers written is to not pay anyone to write them at all.  The only thing that will change their mind is if ATI was to start sponsoring development of the open source drivers for ATI's own cards, *and* Linux users buy exclusively ATI cards, *and* the Linux video card market is a significant proportion of the video card market.

In the meantime, those Linux users who buy the cheapest card that gets the job done, even when it only works using proprietary drivers, are reinforcing the status quo.

Alex