[forrestthewoods]

Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan? I don't know why Linus would expect a corporation to devote significant resources to an endeavor out of kindness. Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Edit: I expected downvotes and I'll gladly take them if someone can explain to me how Nvidia is being unreasonable.

[tikhonj]

Linus actually talks about this later on. He lists off some reasons for a company to be difficult and then basically says that there is nothing he can do but be sad about it. He then wishes that everybody could be as nice as him. In short, tautologically, it would be nice for Nvidia to be nice.

Nvidia is being unreasonable in the same general way as Apple is unreasonable with its walled garden and other companies are unreasonable with pollution and poor working conditions. Just because you can get away with something and it makes economic sense does not justify it and does not make it reasonable!

I really don't think we should accept every company's actions just because they make business sense. We, as consumers (and as developers) should promote altruism and good behavior. Being a corporation is no more a license to be a jerk than being a normal person--it's legal in both cases, and we should not condone it in either.

Good communities have their own standards above and beyond the law. In the academic community, plagiarism is not tolerated even if it does not infringe on copyright. The open source community should similarly not tolerate companies and individuals who use the open source software and then refuse to cooperate. And this is all that's needed: cooperation. I don't think anybody even expects Nvidia to write open source drivers; all they want is enough information to not waste time reverse engineering each chip.

In short, Nvidia is unreasonable because it is acting like a jerk. Being legal and making business sense should not justify being a jerk, and we should disparage and avoid companies that act like jerks. So yeah, fuck Nvidia.

[lsc]

>Ungrateful? Since when is that part of any sensible business plan?

If you depend on free software to sell your hardware, it is probably in your interest to see to it that the people that write the software that is required to sell your hardware don't hate you.

[nitrogen]

As an example of this, kernel developers have in the past responded to NVidia by marking kernel symbols used by the nvidia kernel module as GPL-only.

[twelvechairs]

> Nvidia will play nicely with Linux when it becomes in their financial interests to do so.

Not to disagree with your point (which is right), but It becomes in NVidia's financial interests when they have negative press coverage because someone like Linus says bad things about them.

I hope you understand what I am saying. Linus isn't just talking in an abstract-intellectual environment, his voice is strongly publicised and is here he is using it as an activist, to force NVidia into action. Its all part of the game...

[batista]

This is correct in abstract, but not in real terms. I don't think Linus sayings have any significant effect on NVidia's bottom line (if they have any effect at all).

It's not like more than 0.01% potential buyers will read this Linus quote and choose a competing product. Especially if NVidia's product is the best for their use case in the first place.

[danmaz74]

A bad hit to your image among opinion leaders in your field might not hurt your sales right away, but it can hurt them in the long run if this creates a negative image for your brand.

[exDM69]

Linux is quite popular with scientific computing people doing GPGPU math.

[batista]

All 10 of them?

Less fun edition: I'm sure it is. As it is with Linux based 3D render farms. Do both of those represent a large portion of Nvidia's income or an insignificant one?

I presume it's the latter: there are billions of desktops/laptops but only several thousands of scientific computing / 3D rendering installations. The fact that Nvidia doesn't seem to go out of its way to help people using Linux seems to corroborate that.

[lailoken]

Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology. And how about a large portion of android phones?

[batista]

>Clearly you have not worked in enough fields to see where this may be used. I've worked at high frequency traders where we used some of this technology.

And clearly if I had to have worked to some niche fields to know about that use, it's not that widespread.

I seriously doubt Nvidia's bottom line is affected by such professional uses of GPUs.

>And how about a large portion of android phones?

What about them? You think companies like Samsung or Motorola are gonna switch just because Linus said something negative? Or that Android customers are gonna demand a different GPU?

Not to mention that Nvidia is, if not "the only game in town", one of the "counted on the fingers of one hand with some digits cut-off in a tragic saw accident" games in town.

[alecco]

Linus rightfully singled them out. Are you saying the others are stupid?! Nvidia has the behaviour of a sociopath.

[forrestthewoods]

The video in question (including the woman's question) require a lot of outside knowledge to understand. Maybe I'm missing critical information? Right now Nvidia Optimus technology work only on Windows 7. It doesn't even work for Windows Vista or Windows XP.

Why should Nvidia devote resources, potentially a significant amount, to make Optimus work on Linux? I do not buy the argument that they should do so out of gratefulness that the Linux based Android OS let's them sell a large number of unrelated chips.

I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but citing a lack of "gratefulness" is not compelling.

[flabbergasted]

I think the real issue is that Nvidia is the most closed when it comes to releasing specs. With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

[psykotic]

> With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

That may be true for specific features like Optimus--I can't say. But if you're talking about writing a full 3D driver stack for a modern GPU, you're almost certainly underestimating the effort involved by several orders of magnitude. NVIDIA has hundreds of full-time software engineers working on the various parts of the GPU driver stack. Now imagine doing it without the immense institutional knowledge.

[thristian]

Nobody disputes that nVidia's drivers (and hardware) excel at pushing textured triangles, but that particular measurement is fairly high up Maslow's Hierarchy of Video Driver Needs. As I understand it, people generally want nVidia drivers to be open source so they can add solid support for things like XRandR (instead of stupid TwinView), reliable suspend/resume, kernel mode-setting, that kind of stuff.

[grannyg00se]

Furthermore, the woman who posed the question indicated that she knew the Optimus drivers were going to be troublesome for linux. Why would you try to combine two technologies that you know are troublesome to get working together and then complain about it?

[marshray]

Historically, the Nvidia proprietary drivers have sucked less than ATI/AMD's. I had had a not-so-horrible experience with them on my previous laptop. To be fair, I've also had a not-awful experience with AMD's OpenGL drivers, too.

Now try to find a laptop with a discrete Nvidia GPU that doesn't have this Optimus junk and you'll see the problem.

[g-garron]

You are right, business are business. But you do not need to be a badass. And the world changes (the ones that needs you now, will be the ones you need tomorrow), I have learned that the most grateful you are in business, the better business you do. Edited for clarity.

[chalst]

Quite. Given that the PC market, which I believe is the source of their highest margin sales, seems to be shrinking, perhaps high-handedness with potential allies is not the wisest course of action.

[ElCabron]

Do you think NVidia is not using Linux as part of their business ? If they use it or used it in the past, they could be more supportive. I wonder what will happen when Linux will be a gaming platform ?(Steam and others are going in that direction).