There has been a lot of debate lately about the issue of binary drivers in Linux. Most of these discussions centre around the nVidia graphics driver. What many of these debates under-emphasise or even overlook is the importance of the Nouveau project. Nouveau is an effort intended to go beyond the 2D capabilities exposed by the nv driver, by providing full support for 3D. The end result will be a 100% free driver on Linux-based systems for nVidia graphics hardware. This is all without the assistance of nVidia, so much work needs to be done to interpret how the hardware behaves and write the required supporting code.
To support these valiant efforts, a pledge has been established to raise at least $10000 USD towards Nouveau’s development. This target has been successfully met with a month to spare, but don’t let that stop you from contributing. Even if you would like to see nVidia’s driver included in GNU/Linux distributions, I’m sure that most of you will agree that it is preferable for us as a community to have our own free driver. All it costs to play a part is a meagre $10 USD. How much is your freedom worth?
LotD: LCA2007 presenters should consider incorporating Gems into their presentations.
January 11th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
(Link to the pledge is wrong)
January 11th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
The link works for me. A problem is that my hosting provider, Blogsome, prefixes all links with a “http://yama.blogsome.com/go.php?”, so everything is routed through them first and is then redirected to the site concerned. These might screw up if you have some sort of filtering proxy which blocks redirects.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:53 am
There’s no link to the actualy pledge site:
http://www.pledgebank.com/nouveaudriver
January 12th, 2007 at 10:20 am
It looks like Planet Ubuntu doesn’t like the ‘pledge’ link in the RSS feed for some strange reason. It seems to work fine everywhere else.