Opinion: NVIDIA drivers are a BAD Thing [tm]

[Sean Estabrooks]

On Tue, 18 May 2004 08:12:18 +0100
Rui Miguel Seabra <rms at 1407.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 17:02 -0600, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
> > At 15:48 5/17/2004, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> > >On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 15:03 -0600, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
> > > > >Then it gives you no warranties, offers no responsability or liability
> > > > >for problems (imagine if in certain conditions you got a total
> > > > >filesystem corruption and lost something important...).
> > > >
> > > > Please, show me any application that *does* take responsibility or
> > > > liability for any of those things!
> > >
> > >No one does it on proprietary software, normally. And it is one possible
> > >source of revenue with Free Software.
> > 
> > Still, you're complaining that NVIDIA does not do a thing which no one else 
> > does either. I fail to see the relevance of that.
> 
> I'm not complaining about this in particular, do not try to make it a
> small item.
> 
> I stated a series of facts, which you now seem ready to discard for one
> point where you refuse to see the problem.
> 
> It's not that it offers no warranties. It's that you can't even check or
> pay someone to check and give you liability.

If we can discard the argument about whether open source is preferable
to closed source things become simpler.   If you accept the premise that
open source _is_ preferable, then you can talk about how to promote
more open source adoption.   If you don't accept this premise there is
no point reading further.   But really..  doesn't it seem sleazy to capitalize
on the benefits of open source and not believe that it is preferable to
closed source and try to support it?   So, i'll hope we can agree this far.

So, to the question of how to promote more open source adoption.
It seems to be well accepted that the market place _rules_ and every dollar
spent is a vote.   Being simplistic then, the more "votes" that companies 
get because they support open source (intel seems to be a pretty good actor
these days for example)  the better.    The fewer "votes" that companies 
who don't support open source get (NVIDIA in this case) the better.  

Everyone has to decide for themselves if their immediate needs outweigh
the benefits of  not rewarding closed source companies.   If *everyone* was 
really idealistic and joined forces supporting open source companies there
is every reason to believe the market would respond favourably.  However, 
it seems more people are content to just use whatever works and not follow 
a more principled course of action.  Such is life.

Cheers,
Sean.