"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..."
