If it was Richard Stallman who said this, one could think it is the ideology that speaks. But Linus has always been the practical guy, the “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” one. If he says all this, the thing MUST be badly broken. And none knows that better than him.

NVidia owes me absolutely nothing. However, I owe them absolutely nothing, too. If they don’t supply me a driver I can rely on, they don’t supply me a hardware I can rely on – I will counsel everybody to never buy their hardware. And I do counsel this.

And more. Open source is not about feeling ideologically satisfied – it is about being able to fix the damned bugs of the developer. If the developer insists on locking the bugs inside their product, how do you expect me to buy, support or even tolerate them? Good grief!

After I first built my desktop, I used to use the on board Intel graphics in my motherboard. And, while Intel may work closely with open source and all of their drivers may be open source, their 3D performance is atrocious. It was dreadful for gaming, in both Windows and Linux, which is why I bought my Nvidia card. Gaming has been great since I bought it.

So, what exactly is the Linux community complaining about? So what if Nvidia doesn’t play in the sandbox with the other kids? They still release (for the most part) good Linux drivers for their products.

While there are companies that don’t even do that much like Imagination with their PowerVR GPU’s for example. Nvidia is just the big name company on the list.

Mind part of the complaint is having to deal with companies that don’t provide Open Source Drivers. So more than just a lack of support but the type of support as well.

While even the companies that do provide Open Source drivers tend to have slow updates and release schedules. So it’s a constant struggle.

It’s more about resenting a small handful of companies having a death grip on the market and using consumers as poker chips. The only thing I can do is A) vote with my wallet B) gripe on the internet

And here we are. :) Torvalds has taken great pains to make it clear he has no bias other than making Linux better. If he says NVidia are being a bunch of spoiled children, I’ll take his word on it, and purchase hardware accordingly. Trust is very important.

My only worry is, as a long time user of Linux, that Android will do more harm than good to Linux in the long term, not because of Linux or GNU developers, but by Google’s management. I’ve always been surprised by how fundamentally flawed Android is (Java/Davlik,, total disregard for security, latency), considering how well they’ve developed their Chrome/Chromium browser.

The Open Source Nature of Linux doesn’t make it ideal platform to sell games to begin with and the low cost model used on Android won’t work for desktop systems where people expect better gaming experience that the low cost games simply can’t provide.

Then add the high fragmentation of Linux with literally hundreds of different distros and a constantly evolving Kernel.

Even with the more popular Android platform games are rarely optimized for the hardware because of the fragmentations of both the software and hardware.

While driver support has to improve before they can even run the latest games on the latest hardware with Linux, but right now it can still take a year or two, if not longer, to get proper drivers after new hardware releases.

Really, even for game consoles that have the advantage of not having to deal with constant kernel changes and multiple versions of the OS still take a few years for game developers to fully take advantage of the hardware.

Thus why the Status quo hasn’t changed even though they’ve known about Linux advantages for years.

Though when future versions of Android allow desktop Linux to be run with the same kernel and thus run on the same device without needing to dual boot then we may see more interest finally start but all the issues I mentioned have to be addressed before it can be more than just a niche market.

Basically Android contains the Linux Kernel, but not the GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different.

Google primarily designed Android to serve as a Mobile OS for Smart Phones and similar devices. So it doesn’t have the range of features and capabilities you would get with a desktop Linux distro.

While Android is also only mostly Open Source. The Android OS source code is released mostly under the Apache License, which is a lax free software license without copyleft.

So anybody is allowed to download the source code and change it however they like, but they are not required to make their changes available in source code form to the public.

Consequently, this is why we can’t change and recompile things like HTC Sense or MotoBlur because the changes to the base
Android source code aren’t available to us.

Along with also closed driver support helps show how different Android really is from what we would normally consider Linux.

Numbers aside, though, you’re probably right about how much NVIDIA cares about Linus Torvalds and the Linux desktop market.

But key here is not about the kernel mode settings, but Nvidia’s general refusal to work with Open Source developers on any front, desktop or otherwise, even if what open source offers them is extended functionality or performance. CUDA is one pickle, but there are others.

Android is based on Linux, but Android’s graphics stack is very different from Linux. Basically, you can say that Android is Google’s own operating system rather than Linux based open source OS.

And as I’m am trying this on a tegra 2 device, which apparently runs Linux and an nvidia gpu, I would say they do support Linux devices. They just don’t support open source coding. You know another company that doesn’t support an open software infrastructure? Apple. Why isn’t this guy pissed at them. Nvidia doesn’t owe the Linux community a freely modifiable driver set just because they want to be individuals. They provide a set that lets you run their gpu. That is all you are owed.