NVIDIA FreeBSD kernel feature requests

Doug Barton dougb at FreeBSD.org
Fri Jul 7 05:04:12 UTC 2006


I found your manifesto for free software interesting, although I didn't
really see anything new there so I snipped it. In my opinion, you can always
vote with your wallet, and if you feel that strongly about needing all the
parts of your system to be "free," well, knock yourself out.

On the other hand, I like nvidia graphics cards, they meet my needs, and I
appreciate their support of free software, particularly the brand of OS that
I choose to use. It is of no consequence to me that their idea of "free"
does not match up with what others believe to be "truly free."

However, what I did want to react to was this bit below ...

Miguel Mendez wrote:

> And as I see it, NVidia is asking FreeBSD developers to invest man
> hours, for free, so they can release a _proprietary_ driver for FreeBSD
> which you can neither use on !x86/amd64 nor study. Sounds like a very
> nice deal.

You may choose to see it how you wish, and you may also choose to try and
persuade others to see it your way. However, several developers (who are a
lot smarter than I when it comes to kernel stuff) have already spoken up to
say that at least some of the ideas presented would have value in other
areas if they were implemented, so at best I would deem your
characterization to be slanted. You may wish to consider if perhaps it is
not also inaccurate.

Doug

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