[clug] Internode dumps FOSS for MS Exchange

[Paul Wayper]

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On 18/02/10 22:45, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> On 18/02/2010, at 22:06 , Paul Wayper wrote:
> 
>> Of course, what we'd like to see is them just short-cut that whole process and
>> get to the bit where they fund nouveau developers _now_
> 
> Umm…
> 
> Folks write nVidia drivers for free.  Why would nVidia pay them?
> 
> What I expect will happen is they'll churn out the next round of cards with worse and worse drivers, and leave it up to Linux folks to fend for themselves.
> 
> After all, you do it for a hobby, and it costs them money to write drivers for a platform that nobody* actually uses for games.

/me copies and pastes from his own email:

nVidia's Tegra, Ion and other projects
are going to push into the embedded market, where Linux support is
increasingly important.  At some stage a manager in nVidia is going to realise
that it's cheaper to pay their Linux developers to maintain the nouveau driver
- - which now supports all those platforms anyway - than it is to keep writing
the proprietary driver.  And then there'll be that wedge in the door and
nVidia will start gradually start working with the open source community.

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.

They're not _obliged_ to pay them, and yes at some stage they might abandon
their proprietary drivers altogether.  But in general I do nVidia will look at
those economic decisions at some point and come to the conclusions I have.

Have fun,

Paul
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