[AnthonyMouse]

> This "oh, just force them!" mindset is incredibly naive and hasn't worked for desktop Linux in years.

Are you kidding? There are open source drivers for nearly everything on the desktop. The biggest holdout is nVidia, and that's for the same reason as Qualcomm -- they have inadequate competition. There are people who need CUDA which allows nVidia to shove proprietary drivers down their throats. And even that's slowly eroding as AMD comes out of the decade they spent asleep.

The problem with Qualcomm is that they keep buying every prospective competitor and the antitrust authorities haven't done anything to stop them, so there is no market pressure for them to do what the customers want because the customers have no alternative.

[yzmtf2008]

I don’t know about you, but if I were a big company evaluating vendors for my scientific computing / HPC cluster, whether or not a vendor has open source drivers would be pretty low on my priority list. If AMD comes out today with a CUDA competitor that people use with high adoption, companies will switch, and it won’t be because AMD’s drivers are open source.