Comment 1025 for bug 1

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 5:26 AM, mr_willem <email address hidden> wrote:

> First of all, I want to tell that this bug is also very widespread in germany.

I note that the browser market share (as per StatCounter) in Germany
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-DE-daily-20080701-20090329
is approximately on the order of:

FF3: 55%
IE7: 22.5%
IE6: 7.5%

Part of Bug #1 is the diagnostic:

---
1. Visit a local PC store.
2. Observe that a majority of PCs for sale have non-free software pre-installed.
---

For those in Germany, in terms of _just_browsers_ where the software
libre Firefox now appears to represent a *majority* of web users, how
often do you see Firefox actually preinstalled on computer systems in
stores?

If it is significantly less than half (as I suspect; note this article
from a year and a half ago: http://www.crn.com/software/202402974),
then it is clear that the bottleneck in terms of fixing this bug is
the OEMs, not the users...

> On the other hand there are companies who show good support for drivers but are somehow rejected by the community. One of those examples is NVIDIA. I must say I had less problems using their drivers than any of the open source drivers for graphics cards. And their drivers are very performant.

There is no mystery (no "somehow") as to why NVIDIA drivers are
"rejected by the community"; they are closed-source. If you want to
argue that performance-ends justifies the licensing-means, then we
might as well all switch to Macs
(http://www.nvidia.com/page/apple.html) and be done with it, but that
is not what software libre is all about. Also, NVIDIA could choose to
open source their drivers if they wanted (note that ATI also refused
to do that, but then they got bought by AMD and the story began to
change). Really the question you should be asking is 'Why are there
companies who show good support for [Linux] drivers but somehow reject
the community's principles?'