On Sat, Aug 26, 2006 at 01:43:33PM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> 
> If, however, vendors B, C, and D saw revenue or positive intangibles (say 
> open video drivers led to SlickTasticGaming III running on Linux which led 
> to sales of SlickTasticGaming III which was optimizaed for vendor B's 
> graphics, which helped vendor B stay the "hot" vendor for GPUs) from open 
> sourced drivers, then they'd keep open sourcing.
> 

Actually, 3d graphics on linux is being driven more by the 3d
visualisation market than gaming.  The choices for gaming on linux are
very poor and the market very small but it does seem to be slowly
gaining notice by some game publishers.  The reality is that the linux
market is a gnat dancing on the back of the windows market elephant.
Linux drivers usually come out after the card is released - something
that is unthinkable in the windows world, they are binary blobs but,
really, there is no choice in this - you either use a driver binary
blob to make the card run or running a larger binary blob called
windows.  Choose your evil.

I am not interested in going without my entertainment - I enjoy my
video games.  I have made the, sometimes painful, decision that I did
not want windows (not because ewww it's windows but due to the
direction they are heading with things like drm) so I game on linux.
This can be difficult at times.  Yes, I do use the binary driver
because I cannot play games any other way.  Nobody has stepped up to
reverse engineer or otherwise write a driver for my late generation
nVidia 3d accelerator card and, of course, the documents are simply
not available.  I know that ATI would not even release the documents
for their latest cards under NDA to Xinside so they could write
drivers, with that sort of attitude I cannot see Open Source getting
their hands on the documents any time soon.  I don't anticipate there
will be much of a change in attitude caused by the AMD aquisition.

-- 
Brett Lymn