
China: Nvidia  Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over Linux Drivers and NRE's - esbwhat
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/6/21/china-nvidia-loses-face-and-a-10-million-pc-order-over-linux-drivers-and-nres.aspx
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vidarh
As much as I _want_ this to be true, I don't see anything in terms of sources,
I've never heard of this site before, and the style of writing doesn't exactly
make it seem very credible.

I haven't tried very hard, but didn't immediately find any other sites with
this news that weren't simply linking to or regurgitating this article. Losing
or winning a contract this size is something you'd expect a lot of well known
news sites to cover.

~~~
vlasta2
Also, there is one thing about the title of this story that I do not
understand. Why would a failed negotiation imply that "nvidia is losing face"?

~~~
dewiz
as far as I can understand the convoluted article, the losing face part refers
to Linus' outing

~~~
obtu
The connection they imply is doubtful. They give no date for the Nvidia
negotiation, but (assuming it isn't misrepresented) it must have taken a lot
of time (enough that the Chinese could pick something from AMD in the end).
And I doubt Linus heard about it, either (the “behind the curtain reason for
Linus' frustration” idea must have come from someone unfamiliar with him or
the video of the event). The only commonality is that both find Nvidia hard to
work with, in different contexts.

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NiekvdMaas
It seems the site is down, so here is the Google cache link:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2012/6/21/china-
nvidia-loses-face-and-a-10-million-pc-order-over-linux-drivers-and-
nres.aspx&strip=1)

~~~
Albuca
Thanks for posting the link!

EDIT: And I get downvoted for saying thanks... so thanks. EDIT EDIT: And a
upvote. Cheers!

~~~
SkyMarshal
Protip - if all you want to post is "thanks" or "cool" or something like that,
just upvote and don't post anything, that's what the upvote button is for. The
parent poster will know which one the upvotes mean.

Otherwise, your post will tend to get downvoted around here for not saying
anything a simple upvote can.

1\. <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
Albuca
Thanks for the info SkyMarshal!

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lifeisstillgood
China is investing in Linux for one simple reason - they can have someone read
the source code.

A (low-level?) war is going on right now between US and China - and the
battlefield are the hardware and software that runs the world.

Can't read the code - then we don't trust that you aren't spying on us.

Unfortunately I doubt they will extend the same rights to their citizens.

On the Nvidia side, this is either the dumbest commercial move ever,(#) or
they really do have quite a lot to hide in that code.

(#) Really I cannot imagine _anyone_ turning down an order on 10 M PCs. Whats
in that code base?

Edit: @virdah - thank you for pointing out the should-have-been obvious.

~~~
megablast
Governments and Universities can already get access to Windows source. I think
the difference is that China can write the source for Linux.

~~~
w1ntermute
Universities are given access to Windows source? I'd never heard of this
before. Do they give access to all accredited universities, or is there some
other kind of restriction?

~~~
gaius
See
[http://www.microsoft.com/education/facultyconnection/article...](http://www.microsoft.com/education/facultyconnection/articles/articledetails.aspx?cid=2416&c1=en-
us&c2=0)

~~~
w1ntermute
> Use of the Windows Research Kernel requires academic affiliation with an
> accredited institution of higher education and direct involvement in
> teaching and/or research, such as being academic faculty members, system or
> lab administrators or instructors, students enrolled in relevant
> undergraduate or graduate programs, or academic researchers working on
> faculty sponsored projects.

As I thought.

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y0ghur7_xxx
I am happy that the Chinese invest this much in Linux. This obviously
motivates big hardware makers to release quality/OS drivers for their
products, and in the end I benefit from that as well.

I remember the times I had to hack around for days to get some particular
piece of hardware to work. That happens less and less, and now most of the
stuff I buy just works.

Video cards and capture cards are the big exception for now, they somehow work
sometimes, but this is getting better every day, and this news takes us in
that direction even more.

~~~
davidw
> I am happy that the Chinese invest this much in Linux.

I wonder how much of that investment finds its way back into upstream
projects. Really - I don't know one way or the other, although I have a
suspicion that they don't really 'get' openness and so probably violate the
GPL.

~~~
dredmorbius
The ultimate incentive to contribute is that maintaining your own separate
fork of development (and backporting/merging upstream changes) eventually
becomes too challenging for most organizations.

Now, for an organization operating at China scale, it's possible that a fork
could be sustained (so, the "China Syndrome" becomes the "China Fork"), but
it's likely still not an optimal strategy, and for mundane areas there could
still be substantial leak-back.

So long as changes aren't distributed "outside the organization" (quotes
applied in context of defining "organization" relative to a Communist state in
which nominally all property is State property), legal GPL code release
requirements aren't triggered. Though you and what nuclear-tipped army plan on
enforcing that against Beijing is of course another matter.

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BadassFractal
The article mentions that some of the brightest minds of NVIDIA are now
working in China on its future generations of CPUs/GPUs. I don't have the full
context, but is it possible that we're seeing the first baby steps of a
reverse brain drain?

~~~
jlmendezbonini
It's been happening for a while now (2009 article)[1] and there are probably
earlier reports.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/17/beware-the-reverse-brain-
dr...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/17/beware-the-reverse-brain-drain-to-
india-and-china/)

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mchatfie
IMHO it's a good move by NVIDIA.

The main differentiating factor between NVIDIA and AMD are the drivers.
Release the driver source on any platform and NVIDIA loose their competitive
edge.

They are leaps and bounds better when it comes to OpenGL support. I can't
comment from a DirectX perspective, but they always seem to be pushing the
boundaries where AMD play catch up.

This would be worth hundreds of millions so a 10 million order has to be taken
in perspective.

~~~
rbanffy
Yet, their proprietary drivers are a problem for many clients. If I spend US$
1000 troubleshooting a multi-GPU number crusher that's money I could have
spent in better hardware with drivers that just worked.

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aidenn0
Probably a good business move on nVidia's part; doing a lot of extra work for
free, for a single sale in the hopes that it leads to a better relationship is
typically not profitable.

Furthermore if China wasn't willing to spend $10s of millions more on a $300
million project, one has to wonder how important it was to them.

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gcb
Summary: China asks nvidia for weird list of cpu support, oy maybe opensource
drivers (not clear). Nvidia says no. Article wonders Chinese will knock on
amds door.

...who might say the same, given track record.

