nvidia

[Andy Green]

Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> Andy Green wrote:
>>
>>> The issue is theoretical at best.  In the unlikely event that access to
>>> a video card breaks due to undiscovered bugs in the original _and_
>>> vendor refusal to fix it, I'd expect it to be cheaper to either replace
>>> Linux or the card than to hire an expert to temporarily revive the
>>> now-dead combination.
>>
>> Well whatever your other complaints, I really don't think you take into
>> account the developer suffering that happens from the unsupported
>> reverse engineering aspect that is often part of the drivers.
> 
> Not only do I not take it into account, I can't understand why anyone
> thinks this is desirable compared to using drivers written and
> maintained by the engineers that build the hardware and have the test
> equipment to diagnose it.

It's desirable when the device you want a driver for otherwise drags in
Windows as a "dependency".  That puts you into a situation where your
choice of video card or whatever is making the decisions about security
policy for you, and all the other areas that the choice of OS touches on.

>> More than that though I myself have taken advantage of a kernel driver
>> blowing a panic to look through the source and fix the problem, and send
>> a patch describing and fixing to problem, which was accepted.
> 
> Again, this doesn't sound like a desirable scenario compared to using
> something that already works.

You never had a closed source driver with a bug in?  There's nothing for
you to do but make a bug report and wait.

-Andy