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Re: [News] Another Story About the Evils of Binary Drivers

In article <7133448.7M8AEsrKRJ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > That's all fine and nice, but Nvidia isn't loosing customers to
> > open-source alternatives, are they?
> 
> They are not gaining any, either.

Nvidia aren't gaining customers? Intel couldn't stop praising Nvidia 
at CES and Nvidia is the market share leader and its stock is pretty 
much at an all-time high. Nvidia is a lot of things, but they're note 
a company that's no gaining customers.

> When the above hits the front page of
> Slashdot, many people will have a reason to turn over to the ATi shelf.

"Many people" being mostly unix nerds, all of which aren't in the 
Nvidia target audience. Gamers, generally, don't have time to read 
Slashdot and just hunt FPS, not eventual bugs in the Mac nvidia 
drivers...

> An Open Source community could not only help Nvidia's image, but
> also the quality of its product/s.

Yeah, that is the word in cola - but I've yet to see any examples of 
this. Gimp isn't better quality than Photoshop, OO isn't better 
quality than Office, Firefox isn't better quality than Safari (but 
obviously better quality than IE) and so on.

I'm not trying to step on some toes here, Those are amazing products 
considering how they were developed, but I have yet to see a product 
that actually benefits in *quality* by being open source. In fact, if 
you look at the Mac, the application with the worst quality are 
generally those that are lifted from Linux OSS. OSS Mac software can 
be a lot better, but the best Mac software is most definitely the ones 
made by small or medium-sized companies with a good focus on what 
makes a Mac a Mac and sells great software that leverages OSX 
functions and by costing money, keeps them at the job. Great examples 
of this are OmniGraffle, Acquisition, NetNewsWire and Interarchy just 
to name a few from the top of my head.

OSS software on Linux may look better, but I think that's because 
they're running in a "lesser" environment without a strong UI 
foundation. I'm not trying to diss KDE or Gnome, but I do think they 
are pale compared to commercial UI's. I realize, of course, that you 
won't agree with that, which is fine.

So, the point is that sure, Nvidia had a buggy driver. They won't lose 
any customers due to it thoguh. Do I like buggy drivers? No, of course 
not. But do I think it would have helped Nvidia in any way if the 
driver were OSS? No, I do not.



-- 
Sandman[.net]

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