Rant about ATI

Miles Bader miles at gnu.org
Wed Aug 9 00:26:14 PDT 2006


Marek Wawrzyczny <marekw1977 at yahoo.com.au> writes:
> If *nux had an equal or majority of the desktop market share (I am allowed to 
> dream), hardware manufacturers (of consumer grade products) would  not 
> hesitate to put money into drivers and we wouldn't really bother to have this 
  > discussion :)

Er, yes we would because: (1) many people do not like closed-source
drivers, even if some (like you) tolerate them; and more importantly
(2) closed-source drivers tend to suck in general, and are a maintenance
nightmare (bit-rot, herrrre we come!).

However, if linux had a large share of the "market", the stupid
attitudes of many manufacturers would probably change for the better.
Currently it seems due more to knee-jerk conservativism and clueless
management/legal-departments than anything else; there's just not
enough money at risk to force them to actually think about the issue for
more than 3 seconds.

-Miles
-- 
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that
 you do it."  Mahatma Gandhi



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