[Panel-devel] ATi- Plasma- support

[Amaury Chamayou]

> If the nvidia drivers were open source, then this effort would have fixed
> the bug a long time ago - but instead, it is currently still a very major
> bug. And it's probably not a fault of nvidia that the bug hasn't been fixed
> yet - there are simply too many hardware and software combinations for them
> to test for, given their presumably small linux development team.
>
> It is precisely graphics drivers (which interface directly with the kernel,
> and are widely affected by the underlying hardware - and hence are so
> fragile) that would benefit the most from open sourcing.
>
> Regards,
> David Saxton

As nvidia people have repeated so many times, there are significant portions 
of their source code (esp S3TC related stuff) that is licensed from third 
parties and that they just can't open source. This is not going to change 
anytime soon. The nvidia guys are fairly open minded and willing to get 
involved in open source (just tell me of another brand that has drivers for 
linux 32 _and_ 64, freebsd and solaris...), but there are some things they 
just can't do right now. Let us not spit in the soup for now. Hopefully 
they'll end up open sourcing it all, but we should really stop complaining 
about this all the time.

Just my 2 cents
Amaury