NVIDIA FreeBSD Kernel Feature Requests, interesting info for dfly?

James Mansion james at wgold.demon.co.uk
Sun Jul 16 15:07:58 PDT 2006


>    Fine.  Go and do it, instead of complaining about it.

I'm sure you'll check the IP and find that actually I'm not
Danial/Dmitri/whatever, but please, take a step back before
writing this sort of thing.

It really does make me question whether I want to use
anything from projects with this attitude.

Quite independantly of whether any payment is made,
out here I feel like a customer of operating system
producers.

The major cost to me of an OS on a PC is my time, not the
rather trivial amount of cash involved.  To me, its a customer/
vendor relationship.

So please, don't respond to customer/user suggestions that
way, unless you want to be treated like an amateur having a
play to see what you can do.  I didn't think that *was*
what you wanted.

Do you want a user community?  You need to respect users who
have no intention of developing your system.  They might have
enough on their plate solving their own development problems.

As it happens, I agree with the original post: if you are
too small to define de facto standards, and there is no
de jure standard to hide behind (not that they always matter
that much in reality) then practicality says that its
necessary to go with the flow and find a way to use whatever
is there, and if that's an NVidia blob for Solaris or Mac or
even Windows, then so be it.

In the particular case of graphics drivers, its very much
more attractive to target a system which can also be the
desktop of choice.  Maybe second best would be decent Xen
guest support, but it surely must be a distant second.

I can see that in a security oriented appliance there may
be a good case against using a blob for verifiability, but
for a desktop developer environment?  The arguments against
in that case look like sour grapes about the perceived
inconvenience.  I don't have access to the guts of the
Triarch and Tibco libraries we use, nor the Sybase and Oracle
clients, and it doesn't stop me from doing my job.

James








More information about the Users mailing list