1 Dec
2004
1 Dec
'04
8:31 p.m.
On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 20:15, Marek Peteraj wrote:
Children, children, try to be civil. You miss the point Dave. I
don't have to design my own OS. Someone else did it for me and put it
under the GPL so I can use it. Unfortunately RME didn't do that and I
can't force them to. The software I write is also under the GPL so
someone else can use it anytime they want. That, though, is my (and
Steve's and Jack's and Ron's and Patricks') choice. Nobody twisted our
arms. *If* I was in the market for an RME Fireface I would hope that
RME would put out *any* kind of Linux driver for it. Eventually, if
someone were sharp enough, they'd reverse engineer it and then I could
switch to the open source driver. I seriously doubt that anyone is
going to get the generic NVIDIA driver to run as fast as the one that
NVIDIA puts out and, until they do, I'm stuck with a closed source
driver. I'm not going to cry about it though.
The point is not that someone might reverse engineer and do a
worse/better oss driver. The point is that nvidia, ati, xgi, matrox
*should* do open source drivers.
I agree but I can't make them even though we're a fairly large
outfit.
Jan
On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 00:29, Jan Depner wrote:
I certainly agree. We're using windows because I write about 60% of
the sonar/navigation processing software we use and I refuse to have
Windoze in my office.
On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 16:37, Dave Robillard
wrote:
Jan no offense. But i don't care about your 200 linux systems.
Simply because if nvidia didn't care at all just like RME does with it's
fireface, you would use windows on your 200 machines. But OTOH, if you
had windows on those 200 machines before, had nvidia cards installed in
those boxes, and in order to reduce TCO you went with linux instead of
buying new licenses for a new version of windows, and were forced to use
nvidia binaries because those machines had nvidia cards installed
already, then that's kindof fine. Kindof because there still would need
to be a very _pragmatic_ reason to ditch old versions of windows. But i
certainly wouldn't advise people to go buy nvidia because of their
"exceptional" binary drivers. Too careless.
On Tue, 2004-30-11 at 17:43 -0500, Lee Revell
wrote:
My problem is a whole lot more important than 1 silly little sound
card. As I said before, somewhere around 200 Linux systems with NVIDIA
cards and the proprietary driver. The "more important" things you speak
of are important to you but not to me. I don't belong to your church. No one said they were good. I just said it was
better than no support
at all, and whatever RME decides to do, they designed the hardware, it's
THEIR CHOICE.
No, it's not better than no support at all. No support doesn't destroy
Linux in the long run. Try to think on a little wider scale than
getting one silly little sound card to work in your specific (x86,
running a "supported" version of the Linux kernel) computer. There are
more important things than trivial convenience for a small subset of
Linux users (at the expense of all the other ones) you know.
The problem is that there are not that many users
still. And IIUC you're
still somehow forced to do this and that with your kernel in order to
get it to run, and it's still not runnnig 100% with every application(2
or 3 people reporting problems here during this long discussion).
If they discontinue your nvidia card then you're either stuck or need to
buy another card, having no guarantee that the new one will work
flawlessly(and it's probably harder to give feedback such as bugreports
on binary drivers - if not anything else, i can imagine communicating
with nvidia - and no chance for an attempt to fix it).
I would like nothing better than to switch to an open source driver
for exactly the reason you set forth.
I think it's fine to use binary drivers if you
have no choice as in - i
had windows, switched to linux and heck no oss drivers!. But in that
case, if you're an open source believer, you still should promote open
source drivers. No matter how well the binary drivers are written.
I am definitely an open source believer and I promote open source
software and drivers. I just can't tell my office that they can't run
the particular piece of 3D software that we need at a reasonable speed.
The software will still run on open source drivers (even the nv driver)
but it's OpenGL and it's slower than molasses in January.
You
can't expect people to respect your choice to GPL the
code you write then bitch and moan when they decide to sell their
hardware under terms that make sense to them. If you don't like it then
pardon my French but you can design your own fucking sound card.
Lee
If you don't like your software being free and open, then pardon my
French but you can go design your own fucking operating system. If not,
you could at least have some respect for the ideals that are the reason
for the creation of this one.