B.Yanchitsky@gmail.com wrote:
> Does it really correct to apply the word proprietary to driver? In my
> opinion, driver is not a kind of software, but rather a hardware
> component, loadable, extractable and replaceable but hardware.

Do you really mean that it is possible to download hardware by ftp? I
think that most people agree that drivers are software. There is also
something called firmware. Firmware is not a driver with instructions that
run in your computers main CPU. Firmware is software or data used in
hardware. The firmware could be in a ROM on a card or it could be loaded
by the driver to the card. Firmware is usually not considered to be
hardware or software, it is only called firmware.

> Companies/vendors that produce hardware devices without drivers are in
> fact producing something as cars without engines, useless scrap. nvidia
> is not the only player on the market of graphic chips, and the company
> does not want to play poker having their cards open, I mean to open the
> driver sources under GPL. I do not see any problem here.

The problem is that sometimes software is broken, this is known as bugs.
Mr.b is suffering from a bug that completely locks his machine.

Who is able to fix a bug? Any skilled programmer with access to the source
code. Who has the complete source code? In this case only nVidia.

It doesn't matter if the fault is in the opensource Linux kernel source
code or if it is in the nVidia driver. Only those with access to the
complete source code will be able to reproduce and analyze the bug to fix
it. Only nVidia is able to help mr.b. Do you think that nVidia cares?

regards Henrik
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