Re: NVIDIA FreeBSD Kernel Feature Requests, interesting info for dfly?

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, July 13, 2006 9:26 am, Dimitri Kovalov wrote:

> The truth is that 99% of customers can't do anything with
> source anyway. Which is the problem with BSD. Its only
> usable but hackers because its so hard to make the videos/X
> stuff work. And most 'BSD circles tell you to "fix it
> yourself, you have source', which is bad marketing. No
> commercial concern want to use something like that.

There are people using BSD that have that attitude, but that isn't going
to necessarily apply to DragonFly.  I know that I certainly want more
usability out of the system, like minimal maintenance needs for pkgsrc or
a GUI that requires as little setup as possible.

In any case, there's no ideological requirement against binary products in
DragonFly, as there is with OpenBSD.  Binary drivers/programs can and do
have poor quality, and that can be frustrating when the resources exist to
fix it.  (Emiel Kollof and the NVIDIA driver, for instance.)  But that
doesn't mean a good one won't be used.  I can think of a good number of
programs that if they existed on DragonFly in binary-only form, I'd buy
immediately.  Cedega, or BBEdit, for instance.

This is a lot of blue-sky talking, anyway.  Until we actually have a
binary-only driver or application to bitch about, this issue won't have
any resolution.

> There are good vendors. Vendors that write bad drivers, you
> don't buy from them anymore. Its very easy.

This I definitely agree with.  Market forces are an excellent way to force
quality improvement.