March 27, 2008

Open Letter To NVIDIA

I'm all for Openess. In my last blog post I talked a little about Open Documents, this time I'm going to talk about something different: hardware. While it doesn't shock me that hardware plans are kept close and secret, I think that hardware specs should be allways open. Hardware specs is what will enable anyone to interact with the hardware you make and using all its features. A great example of why this is needed is NVIDIA: their graphics hardware don't have their specs open, and so the experience of using their hardware in systems like GNU/Linux are far from perfect. To convince NVIDIA to change their policy, there's an Open Letter to NVIDIA, saying:

We the GNU/Linux community and the undersigned, kindly request that you, NVIDIA Corporation, increase your efforts in better enabling the open-source community to develop free software drivers for your graphics hardware. Your major competitors in this market, AMD/ATI and Intel, have not only supported the community in open-source driver development efforts but they are now openly releasing hardware programming documentation.

While we are grateful that your company provides one of the best closed-source graphics drivers for Linux, it is not without its problems and prevents many users from having a truly free software platform. You have shown an open-source passion in the past when dropping the nforce-net binary blob in favor of the community-spawned forcedeth driver for Ethernet support on your motherboard chipsets. There has been a rumor that you may be developing an open-source strategy for your graphics products, so if that is the case please let us know your true intentions. Even if you were only able to open a subset of your Linux driver, this still would show a sign of solidarity to the free software world.

We stand united under the name OpenTheBlob.com, but realize that legally it may be next to impossible to open-source the binary portion of your graphics driver due to patents and preserving some intellectual property in this competitive market. What we are, however, asking you for is to support the open-source community to the fullest extent possible. The open-source "nv" driver that you provide for X is an abhorrent disaster that is limited to 2D acceleration and doesn't come without its share of limitations and shrouded code. We look to NVIDIA for providing concise programming documentation to willing open-source developers that is not encumbered by Non-Disclosure Agreements or other legal restrictions.

There is an interested group of developers at hand that are willing to contribute towards an open 3D NVIDIA driver. The Nouveau developers are committed to these free software ideals to the extent that they have spent years reverse engineering your hardware without ever receiving any funds for this immense work, but rely upon community donations. An official open-source driver could complement your binary driver, in order to provide a better "out of the box" experience on many Linux distributions and satisfying the customers -- including corporate clients -- who mandate open-source software.

In a steadfast manner, we request knowing your true commitment to the GNU/Linux and open-source communities. For everyday that you stand by idle, your competitors are continuing to refine their open-source drivers and pushing out more documentation that is better enabling the open-source community. Please let us know what is going on and join the open-source community in this effort.

If you agree with this text, please consider signing this open letter.

at 23:38

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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:58 AM

    Essa historia ja cheira a esturro, quantas vezes a nvidia disse que não o pode fazer porque existe IP que é licenciada pela nvidia a terceiros.
    Eu uso os drivers proprietarios da nvidia e funciona muito bem, e não percebo qual a necessidade real de ter os drivers em open-source(ha e tal, o kernel fica tainted, isso nao é desculpa)

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  2. Mind Booster Noori3:14 PM

    Right. Read the Open Letter: it doesn't ask NVIDIA to disclose nothing that is covered by that IP and licensed that way.

    The problem with proprietary drivers is that, for instance, there's no way to give support to them, or they fail to do some things and your only possible action is... to wait for another version from NVIDIA.

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  3. Anonymous3:59 PM

    «Eu uso os drivers proprietarios da nvidia e funciona muito bem, e não percebo qual a necessidade real de ter os drivers»

    It works good for _your_ _current_ configuration. There's no reason to believe that will be good forever. Just check ATI's older graphic cards: they only work well with the open source drivers. And this older ATI graphics cards aren't unusefull silicon trash. They run compiz perfectly!

    So, if you think that your back is well covered in the current scene, at least look to the past and think twice. And by the way: although I'm an FSF freedom view supporter (and I could be very biased), Linus Trovalds, which is not, also dislikes them (the blobs) very much.

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  4. Anonymous2:21 AM

    I think the problem is that their secret technologies (that they want to keep away from their competitors hands) are not contained strictly in the hardware only. Their hardware-to-software interface is very custom (and different from any standard APIs like OpenGL), and ducumenting it would effectively mean documenting many of their secret technologies.
    When you think about it, there can't be any other possible reason for them to keep their drivers closed sorurce.
    That said i understand them and can not blame them at all about keeping the drivers closed source.

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  5. Mind Booster Noori5:18 PM

    What "secret technologies"? If I buy the board, I buy the technology, I should also be able to use it.

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