This would be a great thing, and would encourage me to buy nVidia in the future, rather than from competitors.
I tend to agree with this, now I know that sometimes code is copyrighted by other companies and doesnt always make it possible. However like the nouveau team are doing you could do a clean room version and then truly open the drivers
I have exclusively purchased NVidia graphics products. I have been considering the implications of the closed nature of the NVidia graphics drivers for Linux pretty heavily lately. My next graphics card purchase will have to be open and free to use as I please.
Open your hand for the future
Yeah, open the drivers! It will benefit you
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 gracious 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
We are reluctant to promote any video solution with closed-source drivers, while a comparable open-source solution exists that will provide our website visitors a more trouble-free computing experience.
Open Source
do the right thing
Me parece q daria mejor soporte para juegos tambien ya q no habria tantos poblemas con las placas de video
we NEED those drivers to be open source! COMMON! :)
Absolutely. NVidia's cards are the greatest, but we Linus users REALLY want to be able to run them how they're meant to be run.
If nVidia doesn't open-source their driver code then its ATi all the way. GL to both, but I'm only going to use the one that'll be most preferable on my *nix systems.
Czech Republic Hlavni 57 74711, Kozmice
My girlfriend and I have both been having stability issues with the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver recently (she solved it by switching to the open-source nouveau driver, and I solved it by switching my graphics card out for an ATI R300 that's well-supported in the open-source radeon driver). I would very much appreciate it if NVIDIA would follow AMD/ATI in providing open specifications for all or most of their cards' functionality!
☭Oh well if they don't do it, i'll just run to hd cards from ati asap☭
I want to change my old nvidia video card for something newer. I hope you want me to become your client again, Dear Nvidia :)
yea nvidia please, I have 5 machines running linux and using 8600 GT or GTS. They all run great, we would really appreciate a open source driver.
open your mind and graphics drivers ;)
What I really want it opensource drivers for XP and vista the forceware drivers have historically been the pits. Last time I tried to use nvidia hardware on my machine that I do equal ammounts of gaming and media playing on, the software had a huge bug that messed up the aspect ratio of my widescreen videos.
This would be beneficial for all concerned, including NVIDIA which would have a community working on their drivers for free.
Please support your customers regardless of which platform they use - support innovation!
Please do it! May God bless you nVidia to pick up the right decision!
do it nvidia!
Go go go NVIDIA
I think it is about time you (NVidia) do this
that would be great!
I have been a long-time user of Nvidia products -- please join in with the open-source community in this effort.
signed.
I agree! I also like pie!
doo et
Please Open the Code!!
The Nvidia drivers are great, but they could be better with the help of the community. I say go for open source.
Never owned any other graphics card than NVIDIA. Using NVIDIA graphics card under Linux for more than 6 years now.
OK!
Please get the ball rolling NVIDIA.
To a better Linux Community
nvidia open
Lets all hope for the best!
Open up the specs. Nvidia surely doesn't want to lag behind, do they?
nVidia, you will do it later, why not sooner?
from Spain
After Intel and ATI, why not nvidia?
Hello. Please open up your drivers.