Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

[Gene Heskett <gene.heskett@verizon.net>]

On Monday 05 December 2005 13:44, Alistair John Strachan wrote:
>On Monday 05 December 2005 13:07, Pekka Enberg wrote:
>> On 12/5/05, William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
>> > I expect the closed source IP affairs rather to keep chipping away
>> > until Linux is dead, or they get tired and change strategies to
>> > kill it, versus any sudden changes of course.
>>
>> Alternatively, take away ndiswrapper and binary-only ATI and NVIDIA
>> drivers, and perhaps the users will start to care and pressure their
>> vendor to open up. I know I have become a very disappointed ATI
>> customer after figuring out that they have zero interest in me using
>> the hardware I paid for on Linux...
>
>The problem with this approach is the tiny size of the minority of
> customers using ATI's video cards on a non-Windows OS.

Hey, I resemble that remark.  I've been using an ATI XTacy 9200SE for
a couple of years now, since an nvidia card crowbared the buss & blew out 
a
motherboard.  Needless to say, I wasn't happy with nvidia over that. 
I bought a faster cpu & more ram on a different mobo for this machine.

But, get this:  Another new board, with the same cpu & ram on it, is
now running that cpu 70F degrees cooler, at 200 mhz faster on the cpu
clock.  With another nvidia card in it, running my milling machine.

>I think the only way we can persuade vendors to not take the direction
> that Arjan speculates they will, is to increase the Linux userbase
> (and therefore ATI customers using Linux) by making "Desktop Linux"
> increasingly competent.

I'm not a 'gamer' so the last frame per second isn't that important
to me, but its close to 1000 on a small piece of a 1600x1200 screen.

>As easy as it is to be pessimistic about binary vendor lockin, there's
> still places in industry, government and inevitably the general public
> where Linux is slowly starting to take off as a real desktop
> alternative to Windows.

Its been my alternative since 1998, never was windows here, coming in
from the amiga world.
>
>When this happens, vendors will just have to solve all the IP nonsense
>associated with their hardware, or design hardware to be more dependent
> on firmware so that largely open source drivers are more feasible for
> them.

Don't hold your breath, its not healthy in the long view...

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.