
Nvidia  Is Joining The Linux Foundation - voodoochilo
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA2NzI
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DallaRosa
I wonder if this is gonna be just like Broadcom joining the Linux
Foundation...

(for those that didn't get it, I meant "nothing at all")

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Tuna-Fish
Huh? After joining up, broadcom produced the "brcmsmac" driver, which is now
part of mainline, and modern broadcom devices typically work out of the box.
Broadcom joining the Linux Foundation certainly had a lot of effect. It's just
that these things take time. If nVidia makes the call that they are going to
support OSS drivers today, it would likely take at least a year before
anything percolated up to normal users.

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DallaRosa
I'm just saying that out of my own experience. I found a bug in their driver
with kernel 2.6.37 and I wrote a patch and sent them. The answer I got was:
"Our internal version works properly with 2.6.37 but we haven't had enough
complaints to make releasing this patch necessary" (ok, those weren't the
exact words but that was the meaning of it). So I learned not to expect much
of them.

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ekianjo
What the article doesn't fully answer is: "what are they gaining from joining
the Linux Fundation ?". Any idea?

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akg
I think that more and more software is becoming a means to sell your hardware.
I would assume that Nvidia wants to utilize as much of the community as
possible to push the next wave of Linux based mobile devices. They aren't
really making money off the software anyway, so I doubt it would hurt them to
open-source that and it can help them to push their products on more linux
based devices.

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yabai
I imagine they will not open source their Linux drivers. While I wish they
would, I am not certain that would make business sense for them.

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odiroot
So, can I get my Optimus-enabled Linux drivers now?

Nah, probably just another empty statement.

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lookelsewhere
I was fooled into thinking this was something significant. Hopefully, they'll
prove us all wrong and we'll start to see some meaningful contributions headed
our way even though it's not what the past has shown. Or maybe I can accept
this title as link bait and move along.

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jfoldi
Is this good for open source?

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prg318
I'd say its negligent. From the article:

"Among the many Linux Foundation members are VIA (their open-source strategy
failed and really haven't been doing anything), AMD (they're still happy with
their Catalyst binary blob while the open-source support is still lagging),
Adobe (they abandoned Flash Player for Linux and most of their software is not
available natively under Linux), Oracle (enough said with their share of
controversies in various open-source communities), and a host of mobile-
focused firms like ARM / Qualcomm / Samsung that don't ship full open-source
graphics drivers for Linux (the best case to date for them has been open-
source kernel drivers with closed-up user-space components, some of which are
being reverse-engineered). "

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skystorm
You probably meant "negligible" ;) But I otherwise agree that nothing much
will come of this.

