--- John Scott
Correct me if I'm wrong, but 3dfx drivers for linux were offerred on their webpage, but they were community written drivers, not written by 3dfx themselves.
That's a long and complicated story. In short: - A hacker named Daryll Strauss bought a 3Dfx card. - DS wanted to use the 3D functions of the 3Dfx card, but had no drivers. - DS signed the NDA to see how GLIDE worked, and wrote a binary-only driver. - DS released the Binary driver, 3Dfx started to pay attention. - 3Dfx allowed DS to release source code, driver was Free Software. - DS moved on, and has been a key player in the DRI project. - 3Dfx made GLIDE free software, not just the driver. This is the story roughly, and may not be 100% accurate, but will do for the sake of this arguement.
That's like saying you're "stuck" with a top of the line Porsche, or Mercedes. Seems fine to me.
You don't change your own oil, do you? Do you even pump your own gas? This is not acceptable; you might as well hire a schouffer. (I can't even spell that word well enough for the spell checker to recognize it.)
As for the other cards "offering" open source drivers, remember that most of the manufacturers with supported cards have given the XFree folks access to info to have the drivers built for free.
Thats very much not true. Matrox and ATI *both* spent money to get their DRI drivers working, Matrox mostly in-house and ATI by contracting Precision Insight. There was a lot of money involved.
NVidia spends their own money to build for linux directly, and they take responsibility to fix the bugs.
You say so now. I remember having to manually change a .c file to get their drivers to work with a low-cost TNT2 card that I once had. I'll drop my gauntlet for now. ===== -- -=|JP|=- Hit me! - http://www.xanga.com/cowboydren/ Jon Pennington | Debian 2.3 -o) cowboydren @ yahoo . com | Auto Enthusiast /\\ Kansas City, MO, USA | ICQ UIN 69 67 29 31 _\_V __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Find the one for you at Yahoo! Personals http://personals.yahoo.com