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Why Some Vendors Refuse to Open Source Drivers

Story: Driver education for Linux novicesTotal Replies: 1
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henke54

Jan 08, 2006
2:48 PM EST 		quote : "Some vendors refuse to open source their drivers. Some refuse to even provide a driver. " http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/20060108163615614
AnonymousCoward

Jan 08, 2006
3:51 PM EST 		It should also be added that S3 video cards in general suck, performancewise, and have for as long as I can remember. The Linux drivers for the original Virges and Trios always sucked because there was a maze of twisty little chipsets, all slightly different. This made it too risky to try to support advanced features for a few chipsets, because it would break otehrs. It was also notable that for many operations the cards were slower with hardware acceleration enabled even under Windows (3.11 through to early ME, at least).

If S3 expect to be taken seriously, they need to let the FOSS people draw as much performance as possible from their hardware, and that means documentation. With documentation, there will be less need for workarounds because the people writing and maintaining the drivers will understand more about what they're doing.

The argument about the workarounds is specious anyway, since NVidia and ATI certainly have the resources to dismember S3's binary drivers (in a country where it's legal to so do) and find those workarounds without source. Perhps they could phrase it this way: "Under MS-Windows, it was always reasonable to blame the workarounds on OS deficiencies, but here..." (-:

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