On Tuesday 20 April 2004 22:43, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
Of course this means that a few bits will get dropped from the driver *but* what would be great if they make the kernel module free software and let the community improve the driver and do the same with the OpenGL implementation. Then if you need the non-free bits of the driver that are patent and license encumbered then you could resort to a non-free library that Nvidia could distribute seperately.
I guess that depends on what exactly are the juicy bits, I find it suspicious that the reverse engineering/OS community have completely failed to extract any sort of 3D capability from the card whatsoever, Quite complicated things have been successfully worked out in the past. So I am guessing that there is something very weird going on with the way the driver and card interact when doing 3D.
This also ties up very well with past problems Nvidia have had with their cards being fussy about chipsets/AGP settings/memory types/Power Supplies/ BIOS versions/Price of tea etc....What if say Nvidia know a way of making the AGP bus work in a more efficient way, and what if that mode is the only way you can talk 3D to the card......purely speculation I know but what if that "interface" is the bit Nvidia can't let out ? then they could only really give us what we already have with the "nv" XFree driver.