[ILUG] OT: PCI TV tuner card for 50 bills

[Liam Bedford]

David Giles wrote:

>On Fri, 2004-02-27 at 00:39, Paul Jakma wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, David Giles wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>source.  I'm sure nvidia are shipping more cards as a result than ATI. 
>>>      
>>>
>>Eh, you seem to be mistaken. The NVidia driver is _binary_ only, with 
>>a small GPL open shim to interface the binary object code with the 
>>kernel de jour.
>>
>>regards,
>>    
>>
>
>Quoting myself:
>  
>
>>If there experience with releasing closed source
>>drivers is positive they may be more likely to consider going open
>>source.  I'm sure nvidia are shipping more cards as a result than ATI. 
>>Maybe soon ATI will realise that if they ship an open source one they
>>will get the lead.
>>    
>>
>
>I knew that :-)  If you substitute binary for closed source above you will see what I meant.
>The ready availability of the binary driver is beneficial to nvidia's sales.
>
>Though I do acknowledge that my reasoning is probably flawed:
>ATI instead of saying 'Hey if we release the specs for our drivers, we will get increased sales
>in the open-source market' will say 'Lets copy nvidia's lead and release binary drivers, that
>will keep 'em happy'.
>
>
>  
>
And guess what they did? For anything >= Radeon 9500, you need their
binary only drivers for proper 3D support. It also enables the dual 
monitor support,
and tv-out, which I don't know about in the radeon driver in XF86.

It's a mess, and imo it's not going to get any better. Considering that 
a quote from
Keith Packard at FOSDEM, on lwn yesterday, says that he expects X to be 
3D soon,
like the compositing part of Aqua is done with GL textures etc.

And leaving linux out of it, what about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HURD, SkyOS etc?

Frustrated regards.
L.