No Longer Wireless-less

Now that open source has largely overcome its earlier problems with limited application availability – there's practically no area today that is not served reasonably well by free software – the remaining challenge is hardware support. That's obviously harder to resolve than the earlier software dearth, since it depends not on the willingness of coders to roll up their sleeves and write stuff, but on hardware manufacturers to release either open source drivers, or at least full specs for their kit. But even here, open source continues to demolish the barriers....

On Open Enterprise blog.

NVidia's Unenviable Pariahdom

Failing to take the hint, NVidia decides to remain a pariah:

Nvidia reiterated that it won’t provide open source drivers for Linux because the company claims there is no need for it.

Nvidia provides binary Linux drivers and has open sourced some drivers such as the nv X driver and other utilities that work with the proprietary driver, including the installer, config and settings.The company is a leading provider of graphics cards and software for the desktop and embraces a cross platform strategy.

“NVIDIA supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the NVIDIA Linux driver. NVIDIA’s fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property NVIDIA wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software,” the company said in a statement released today, in response to Linux kernel developers’ criticism of vendors that produce only closed source drivers.

Another Pebble on the Open Driver Cairn

I've written elsewhere about the signs that things are finally moving on the open source drivers front. Here's one more pebble on the cairn:

VIA has released over 16,000 lines of code that provides a frame-buffer driver in the Linux kernel. This code is licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and appears to be crafted by VIA's Joseph Chan. Supported by this driver is VIA's Unichrome CLE266, K400, K800, PM800, CN700, CX700, K8M890, P4M890, P4M900, and VX800 IGPs. We're still pouring over the code, but it seems to be in pretty good shape and does support digital connections (and does seem to support HDMI already) -- in other words it appears to be further along then when the RadeonHD driver started out.

...


Kudos go out to VIA Technologies this morning for this code dump, but the work isn't over. They still have a lot of work left to do to mend relations with the Unichrome and OpenChrome projects and focusing upon 3D and video playback work, etc. However, this is a step forward in showing that VIA may actually come around this time and play ball with the open-source community.

(Via James Tyrrell.)