Why graphics drivers are proprietary

[jdow]

On 2012/10/03 01:13, J.Witvliet at mindef.nl wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: users-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:users-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf Of jdow
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2012 3:52 AM
> To: Community support for Fedora users
> Subject: Re: Why graphics drivers are proprietary
>
> On 2012/10/02 13:17, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 2. October 2012. 20.56.34 Roberto Ragusa wrote:
>>> On 10/02/2012 03:45 PM, Alan Cox wrote:
>>>> Another factor is that the drivers may contain a lot of clever stuff.  A
>>>> long time back one of the problems raised was that vendor A had the
>>>> better hardware but vendor B the better drivers. Vendor B's product won
>>>> all the benchmarks. If they open sourced it then vendor A would duly have
>>>> borrowed all the software tricks and then won hands down.
>>>
>>> So final users would have had the best hardware running the best drivers
>>> (open source too).
>>> This is something which must not be permitted to happen. :-/
>>
>> That is one of the features of civilization based on capitalism --- the target
>> is to gain most money, and to make life miserable for the competition. The
>> actual needs of the end-users are completely irrelevant, as long as your
>> product sells more than the competitor's product. ;-)
>
> Without the capitalism the customer can expect zero improvement,
> particularly with hardware. What incentive would I as a person trying to
> make a living off clever video drivers to continue doing so?
>
> What has capitalism to do with that?
> It is about freedom of choice.
>
> If you think you can build something better or cheaper, you must have the freedom to do so.
> Otoh, if a state-owned-company has "a Plan" to produce the next five years or so, crap at bargain process, so be it.
>
> Just as any customer has the freedom to choose any product.
> And let the customer decide what is important to him: price, feature, quality, stability, support...
>
> Hw

Hw, if there is no incentive to do something, why bother to do it? That
dirty rotten awful stinky evil capitalism provides the incentive. If I
don't get something additional out of working hard, I don't work hard -
indeed, why should I bother to work at all?

{^_^}