NVIDIA release documentation to help Nouveau Project
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Wonderful news friends!
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html
Can you believe this?
"NVIDIA will begin publishing NDA-free GPU programming documentation"
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ2NzY
AMD is on on the action too.
"AMD Publishes HDA Audio GPU Documentation"
Hold on there. Don't get too excited. It's not as if NVIDIA has just released all of their technical documentation to the public. Rather, all that's happened is that NVIDIA has provided one (1) piece of documentation -- which everyone knew already -- and there is no promise of any future documentation. All they've really said is that they'll have some people subscribed to the mailing list. Even then there is no promise that they'll actually say or do anything useful because that statement is qualified with a "try to chime in when we can." (Emphasis on the end of that.)
So, it amounts to providing an already-known piece of documentation and a statement that they might -- possibly -- perhaps -- maybe -- sort of -- potentially -- be able to sort of say something on the mailing list at some future point if they're "allowed" to.
If NVIDIA were really interested in helping their assistance would not be qualified.
It seems more like an opportunity to claim that they help "open source" (since we know NVIDIA doesn't believe in freedom) without actually helping since the info they provided is already known and they're not really committing to do anything. But I'm willing to suspend judgement for now and see what happens over time. At the same time please don't treat this as the second coming.
At least they support 2D acceleration on Tegra line of GPUs.
Unfortunately looks like jxself is only too right
"While I know open firmware would be preferred over binary-only firmware images, hopefully we can find a reasonable compromise there."
--Andy Ritger @ http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014495.html
Honestly, I'm concerned by the reaction to this over there. I would hate to see Nouveau transfer to focusing on binary-only firmware from Nvidia. I imagine we would end up with a similar situation to what we currently have with AMD video cards.
Open source proponents unfortunately fall for this kind of bullshit "cooperation" hook, line and sinker to the point where they seem to think AMD cards have the best "open source" support. It's troubling.
Exciting news anyways. Perhaps if there were more middle-fingers raised.. (;
I am a member!
Just imagine what we could do if we actually stood up now. Unfortunately almost nobody is. We got Linus to give NVIDIA a stern yelling at and all it achieved was was documentation on stuff that wasn't needed.
What do you mean ... what can we do?
I am a member!
It's probably nothing you can do. It's more along the lines of if every GNU/Linux user stood up and said no- then we'd have a decent chance of getting NVIDIA/AMD's attention. The GNU/Linux user base is a significant population to be dealt with despite the impression that many have because of the seemingly low percentage of users running GNU/Linux.
As an example of this demand I'll give you the market for USB wifi cards that target GNU/Linux users. In that instance about 500,000 GNU/Linux users a year buy a USB wifi card. That doesn't include PCI/PCIE/Mini PCIE/etc. If every GNU/Linux user purchased from a free software friendly vendor you'd have solved near all the problems with the lack of free software friendly hardware (probably everywhere for every type of device imaginable, including laptops, desktops, phones, etc).
500,000 USB wifi adapters is about 20 million USD profit a year (given good margins). Canonical was aiming to raise a mere 34 million USD in comparison for the production of a high end phone (Ubuntu Edge, they failed). If you cut that down to a free software friendly phone that resembled the ZTE Open it would probably have succeeded.
One thing to remember is that targeting a niche market is a lot harder than targeting the masses. Targeting the masses will make you rich. Targeting the niche might be worthwhile, but it won't make you rich.
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