Invitation to ubuntu developers

[Tim Schmidt]

On 11/26/06, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> The sad, but true reality is just that the nv driver developemtn seems
> totally dead and seems to regress further. While 2D worked perfectly
> well in Warty, video playback got broken in Hoary, and in Dapper it
> became totally unusable for me (perpetual screen flicker). The bug [1]
> didn't get any reply unfortunately, I guess people just develop/use
> the nvidia driver.

Hey Martin...

I have no doubt development on nv is slow or dead.  Nouveau is a much
more promising project to hack on.  However, 2D - for the purposes of
installing - works perfectly.  For everyone like you, who doesn't get
enough out of nv, and nouveau isn't quite ready yet, I'm all for
making the nvidia driver, as illegal as it is, super-easy to install.
A one-click GUI op, preferably.

I'm perfectly happy with allowing someone to choose bling over
security, Freedom, maintainability (even the worst obfuscated,
hex-encoded code is more maintainable than a binary blob), et al.  But
give users the choice.  In order to do that, the installer must at
least offer the option to install no closed-source stuff.

Sometimes adhering to our (Ubuntu's) philosophy isn't fun.  Mostly
when the open-source solution isn't quite up to snuff yet.  If we all
just went running to the closed fix, there's be no Ubuntu to hack on.

--tim