Örn Hansen <orn.hansen@swipnet.se> [Sat, 1 Nov 2003 18:23:58 +0100]:
In the case of 3D this aspect is really irrelevant.
No, it's not!
There are two main reasons for wanting 3D acceleration, one is games and the other is rendering 3 dimension objects. Both of which are highly commercial in nature, and therefore outside the need of community drivers and stuff.
Ah, then please tell me why there are open source programs that do need 3d rendering, beginning with the 3d screen savers. And Mesa is out of the question, as it's far too slow to do any real stuff. So games would be the only reason I could perhaps accept.
I see no problem, with accepting binary 3D support from NVidia provided of course that they *do* provide these for their cards.
Even if they do, there are a lot of cases where you'd like to have more. Take for instance development kernels (i.e. those with uneven minor version) where lots of things can change which can lead to the nvidia driver not working anymore because symbols (i.e. functions or variables) they need don't exist anymore in the kernel. In that case it's normally rather easy to fix that yourself, given that you have the source code. And before you mention it, I do know that the glue code is open source. But some experiences tell me that the code in the binary only module isn't encapsulated as good as it ought to be. So whichever way you turn it, I uphold my POV that binary only modules are a bad thing that should be avoided as much as possible and so also hardware that needs them to fully use it. Philipp