Comment 1026 for bug 1

Conrad Knauer wrote:

> 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

This is like saying if you don't like the radio in your car, buy a
different one. My system is open. My framework is open. I can hit all
my hardware directly. And while I can not see inside the driver, I can
also not see inside the BIOS, and the other chips on the video card
and... There is a lot of "software" in every system that we can see
totally. So you have to draw a line somewhere. I draw mine in a
slightly different place than you. But do not think that you are not
also choosing to accept some closed source code.

> ... 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?'

Because the driver includes licensed software that they can not give away.