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Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
Apr
18
Proprietary video drivers in Linux
Tagged with system
Some time ago, I wrote a lament about the sorry state of video support in Linux, or more correctly, the crappy Linux support on the part of graphics chip manufacturers. Today, an interesting CNET article touches the issue. Do proprietary drivers belong in a free kernel? I’ll just summarize the views of the main manufacturers here.
ATI defends proprietary drivers on IP reasons: their drivers include licensed proprietary third-party IP that they are required to protect. They also cite teir own IP interests and wish to "maintain the proprietary, trade-secret nature of that as long as possible." Way to go.
Nvidia doesn’t think hackers can write complicated software: "It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help," Also, their customers don’t seem to be complaining enough. They do have open source "where it makes sense". Nice.
Intel seems to be the most interesting company here. They hope to compete against ATI and Nvidia specifically with open source drivers. If their chips become good enough in the near future, I have something to recommend to newbies again!
The article also has lots of interesting comments from the Linux kernel hackers and development of a stable interface for proprietary drivers, as well as the strategies of the commercial Linux biggies Red Hat and Novell. So go ahead and read it in full.