[clug] Internode dumps FOSS for MS Exchange

Paul Wayper paulway at mabula.net
Fri Feb 19 04:51:55 MST 2010


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On 18/02/10 23:32, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> 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.

Sure.

I hate to say this, but you still don't seem to be getting the time line I've
tried to draw.

1) nVidia is working on new hardware like the Tegra and whatever comes after
the Ion and so forth.

2) They see that the nouveau driver is 90% there to supporting it completely
and there existing proprietary driver is 60% there.  And the nouveau driver is
already accepted and used in a bunch of embedded platforms - Meego, Android 2,
etc. - that the Tegra is targetting.  It's going to require less time and
effort to get a developer to push nouveau 100% of the way there than it is
getting their proprietary driver there.

3) Those changes flow back upstream and improve the rest of the nouveau
driver.  People make a big fuss about this and suddenly nVidia contributing
developer time to nouveau makes PR and marketing sense.  It's already been
making economic sense, and this is enough to drive the internal push for
working more with the open source community.

4) Everyone benefits.

Alternately, nVidia does what Microsoft did with its virtualisation drivers
submitted to the Linux kernel: they discover that a driver is for life, not
just for christmas (or the press release) and that it's too hard to actually
work with the Linux community.  Those pesky kernel developers keep wanting
more involvement, they keep asking all these questions, they want you to join
all these mailing lists, and above all they keep on changing things without a
nice comforting meeting with PowerPoint slides and action plans and timelines
and procedures.  So nVidia sidle away from their Linux driver, leave nouveau
to be worked on by a lot of other companies and developers for free, and
everyone ignores nVidia as a source of Linux drivers.

*shrugs* personally, I suspect we'll see the latter course of action.  But I
hold hope for the former.

Have fun,

Paul
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