:LinuxElectrons: Why Some Vendors Refuse to Open Source Drivers
LinuxElectrons: Why Some Vendors Refuse to Open Source Drivers Jan 10, 2006, 02 :00 UTC (3 Talkback[s]) (7269 reads)
"Some vendors refuse to open source their drivers. Some refuse to even provide a driver. The most distinguished of these are NVIDIA, ATI and Broadcom. Wireless drivers are a big problem today and gave rise to NDIS support under Linux. To NVIDIA's and ATI's credit, they have provided binary only proprietary drivers that work on most Linux distributions. ATI is most notable as they been working to make high performance open source drivers available through Xorg for some of their chips. The only time I have seen a NVIDIA or ATI driver fail is when there is no AGP port support for a particular chipset.
"'I headed over to the press lunch, same crowd as yesterday but I did see someone I had missed, graphics board manufacturer S3. I talked to one of their reps (who gave the impression of being fairly senior in the company), and he cast some interesting insight into the whole Linux graphics driver issue,' wrote James Turner of Linux Today..."
