thus Brett Lymn spake:
> 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.

it's possible now to go for userland blobs on Linux:

http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0608.3/1908.html

i still see the problem of supporting only i386/amd64 in the long term 
when accepting blobs. fortunately, there are other OS, and one could 
even start a new one (fork or from ground up).

timo