Archive for October, 2009
Another reason for free drivers
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009Someone not so familiar yet with living in the OpenSource realms asked me why we constantly push for free drivers (graphics drivers in particular) as much as we can. Apart from “with enough eyes all bugs are shallow” (famous quote from L. Torvalds) and making the user more independent from a hardware vendors fate, protection from cheating is another good reason for our attitude. In the referenced article it is demonstrated how a vendor does benchmark-specific optimizations to obtain better results in those and thus positively, but incorrectly, manipulates review-results for their product. Within the world of OpenSource Xorg/DRI-drivers this cannot happen. So to speak xorg-video-ati/intel/nouveau are more honest towards the user than fglrx and nvidia-glx (speaking in Debian/Ubuntu package-name terms here) are. In all fairness I want to mention that fglrx and nvidia-glx provide more complete and robust support for OpenGL and its extensions, when compared to the OpenSource counterparts. Still, looking at my own experience with them, I like the way xorg-video-intel and xorg-video-ati are going in recent times.