OpenTheBlob.com - An Open Letter To
NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation,
We the GNU/Linux community and the undersigned, kindly request
that you, NVIDIA Corporation, increase your
efforts in better enabling the open-source community to develop free software
drivers for your graphics hardware. Your major competitors in this market, AMD/ATI
and Intel, have
not only supported the community in open-source driver development efforts but
they are now openly releasing
hardware
programming documentation.
While we are grateful that your company provides one of the best
closed-source graphics drivers for Linux, it is not without its problems and prevents
many users from having a truly free software platform. You have shown an open-source
passion in the past when dropping the nforce-net binary blob in favor
of the community-spawned forcedeth driver for Ethernet support on your
motherboard chipsets. There has been a rumor that you may be developing an open-source
strategy for your graphics products, so if that is the case please let us know
your true intentions. Even if you were only able to open a subset of your Linux
driver, this still would show a sign of solidarity to the free software world.
We stand united under the name OpenTheBlob.com, but realize that
legally it may be next to impossible to open-source the binary portion of your
graphics driver due to patents and preserving some intellectual property in this
competitive market. What we are, however, asking you for is to support the open-source
community to the fullest extent possible. The open-source "nv" driver
that you provide for X is an abhorrent disaster that is limited to 2D acceleration
and doesn't come without its share of limitations and shrouded code. We look to
NVIDIA for providing concise programming documentation to willing open-source
developers that is not encumbered by Non-Disclosure Agreements or other legal
restrictions.
There is an interested group of developers at hand that are willing
to contribute towards an open 3D NVIDIA driver. The Nouveau
developers are committed to these free software ideals to the extent that
they have spent years reverse engineering your hardware without ever receiving
any funds for this immense work, but rely upon community donations. An official open-source driver could complement your
binary driver, in order to provide a better "out of the box" experience
on many Linux distributions and satisfying the customers -- including corporate
clients -- who mandate open-source software.
In a steadfast manner, we request knowing your true commitment
to the GNU/Linux and open-source communities. For everyday that you stand by idle,
your competitors are continuing to refine their open-source drivers and pushing
out more documentation that is better enabling the open-source community.
Please let us know what is going on and join the open-source community in this
effort.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
February 29, 2008
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