Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluffything | Hacker News Reader

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> Is it really that surprising that users who went with an open-source operating system find open-source drivers desirable too? When you shop for things, are you looking for certain features in a product? Would you perhaps suggest in a review that you'd be happier if a product had a certain feature or that you'd be more likely to recommend it?

It is to me. When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed.".

That's exactly how these comments being made sound to me. Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

I have many GFX card from all vendors over the years, and I've had to send one back because the vendor wasn't honest about things like that.

Do I wish nvidia had good open source drivers? Sure. Do I blame nvidia for these not existing, not really. That would be like blaming microsoft or apple for not making all their software open source.

I do however blame vendors that do advertise good open source driver support that ends up being crap.

What does any of this have to do with nvidia buying or not buying arm ? Probably nothing.

What nvidia does with their GFX driver can be as different from what ARM does, as what Microsoft does with Windows and Github.

> When I buy a car, I do not leave a 1 star review stating "This car is not a motorcycle; extremely disappointed."

That's a bad analogy. A better one would be it's like you bought a car, (an open-source operating system) and this one accessory supplier is selling you what are really motorcycle parts, but just about fit the car barely, (a less-than-great proprietary driver when you explicitly are on an open system). Additionally, they are extremely secretive and absolutely refuse to answer any sort of questions or allow you to modify the parts you purchased from them to fit better by implementing various forms of DRM.

You can just not buy those parts and indeed that's what many users are doing.

This is separate from raising concerns about this somewhat dodgy parts manufacturer potentially acquiring another manufacturer, specifically one that does require a lot of cooperation with others by its very nature.

> Nvidia is very clear that they only support their proprietary driver, and they deliver on that.

It's more complex than that. They seem to actively implement features to make it purposely more difficult to develop an independent open-source driver. This is rather different than just being passively indifferent to open-source. Moreover their proprietary driver can be less than seller too, so am not so sure they "deliver" even on that.

Therefore we, Linux users, can refuse to support a company that only supports their (lacking) proprietary driver and certainly we are within our rights to raise concerns about its purchase of ARM given its actively hostile approach to open-source.

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