Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever – 338 days old

[Alakazam]

"Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has called out NVIDIA for their poor graphics drivers / support in a public presentation. In the talk he called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended his green comments with "NVIDIA: FUCK YOU!"

Near the end of his talk, when asked by one of the attendees about NVIDIA's hardware support and lack of open-source driver enablement / documentation, he had a few choice words for the Santa Clara company.

The article is over at Phoronix

The juicy part starts at 48:10 with a question from the audience and only lasts a bit.

[Grogan]

I'm sorry, but I disagree. While it would be nice if Nvidia would open up their hardware specs, I don't think it's going to happen.

They have done an admirable job of supporting LInux despite the obstacles.

If these open source guys got their way, and nobody was able to write proprietary drivers anymore, we'd simply not have full support for the hardware (e.g. 3D graphics support from Nvidia and ATI) and then even I would stop using Linux, at least on my main system.

Get it? I want my video card to work properly. That means full 3D support AND things like proper, reliable fan control as well. That's also something a proprietary driver does correctly.

[Dark Angel]

I've never had any trouble with the proprietary nVidia drivers in Linux, either. Of the two I honestly would have considered AMD/ATi to be the least Linux friendly and by a long shot!
FFS, it works properly and it's free. I don't care if I don't have the source code when it does everything I want AND does it well!

[Alakazam]

I'm happy with the nVidia drivers also, I just thought it was a funny clip and since it was making the news rounds today............

[Grogan]

I do care if I don't have the source code for drivers... this Nvidia situation is not ideal, and I wouldn't want to casually advocate for others to do the same. It's important that the Linux guys are able to update/fix/improve drivers themselves. While I can't (usually) do that myself, it's important that I be able to compile them. Every driver that's in the kernel tree gets fixed when broken by kernel changes.

Video cards are a bit different though. Yes, it's hardware they are selling, but the drivers themselves are also fairly significant (would lead to exposure of hardware design) and also there is stuff that they don't own. Moreover, some of the encoding/compression schemes are patented by others.

Even if Nvidia and ATI were able to release their hardware specs, there are some things that couldn't be licensed and you'd have a somewhat crippled driver anyway. This is just the reality of the situation.

Sure, Intel video hardware is more open, but it's useless to me as a gamer.

There's no need for something stupid like a NIC or something to be closed source though. I'd toss that in the garbage if that were the case. I will make exceptions for video cards though.

[Bad Haircut]

The inevitable and entertaining follow on..

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/0...%28Slashdot%29

[floppybootstomp]

Interesting. It's just a lot of folk giving their interpretation of events and their point of view with some trying to establish those as facts. As in politician's speeches if something is said often enough then some folk will start to believe. Viz a viz this line from one thread contributor: "This attitude just isn't acceptable any more. Period. Even Microsoft is starting to wake up to that fact." Oh really? One throwaway line without any evidence to support it but I can just see readers nodding their heads in agreement.

I found Grogan's comments above interesting, especially about open source supporters largely being a whiney critical bunch. Too many damn cynics in this world, would be nice for people to look at the bigger picture and offer as much praise as criticism wouldn't it. As a commentator, and not through experience, I'd always been of the opinion that Nvidia offered more support to Linux than AMD/ATI.

Methinks Linus may have made an error but he's so over-confident of support he feels he can say what he likes, probably. Linus Torvalds - God to nerds worldwide? Still, looks as though the outcome may be positive so hopefully the overall situation will improve.

And if I may quote Grogan, I found this line of his to be significant:

Video cards are a bit different though. Yes, it's hardware they are selling, but the drivers themselves are also fairly significant (would lead to exposure of hardware design) and also there is stuff that they don't own. Moreover, some of the encoding/compression schemes are patented by others.

Yes, quite so, how many individuals realise this and more to the point, why don't Nvidia use this as a public argument in their defence?

[ZemaTalon]

Interesting. It's just a lot of folk giving their interpretation of events and their point of view with some trying to establish those as facts. As in politician's speeches if something is said often enough then some folk will start to believe. Viz a viz this line from one thread contributor: "This attitude just isn't acceptable any more. Period. Even Microsoft is starting to wake up to that fact." Oh really? One throwaway line without any evidence to support it but I can just see readers nodding their heads in agreement.

I found Grogan's comments above interesting, especially about open source supporters largely being a whiney critical bunch. Too many damn cynics in this world, would be nice for people to look at the bigger picture and offer as much praise as criticism wouldn't it. As a commentator, and not through experience, I'd always been of the opinion that Nvidia offered more support to Linux than AMD/ATI.

Methinks Linus may have made an error but he's so over-confident of support he feels he can say what he likes, probably. Linus Torvalds - God to nerds worldwide? Still, looks as though the outcome may be positive so hopefully the overall situation will improve.

And if I may quote Grogan, I found this line of his to be significant:

Yes, quite so, how many individuals realise this and more to the point, why don't Nvidia use this as a public argument in their defence?

I agree, ATI support seems to be a lot better now, but in the past I always had better luck with Nvidia cards. And speaking of ATI, nothing was said of their proprietary drivers - why only pick on Nvidia?

[floppybootstomp]

And speaking of ATI, nothing was said of their proprietary drivers - why only pick on Nvidia?

From the video footage of the question and answer session I figured it was Nvidia's non-co-operation that made him single them out for criticism. Presumably ATI do communicate but I don't really know.