ATI versus Nvidia
This article appeared on the FSF site. http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/rms-ati-protest.html
Unlike us, Richard Stallman seems to have quite a clear opinion about graphic cards. He protested during a speech of an ATI representative, holding up this B+W consumers advice:
Richard says: No ATI!
Zmag.org published an interview with Stallman in which he says:
So we are forced to experiment and reverse-engineer, which takes time, or pressure the companies, which sometimes works. The worst example is in 3-D graphics, in which most chip specs are secret. One company has published its specs, and drivers have been written for another without help. But the company “NVidious’ (that’s what I call it) has not been co-operative, and I think people should not buy computers with its chips.
Now, to make our choice more difficult, Richard also says: No NVidia!
Next time I hope he will hold up a sign telling us what we SHOULD buy.
Two things we can do:
First of all, please sign this online petition http://www.petitiononline.com/nvfoss/petition.html asking Nvidia Corp. to release fully-functional open-source versions of their drivers.
Secondly the FSF publishes a list with hardware devices that support GNU/Linux. Check the list before buying hardware.
“Knowing which hardware devices support GNU/Linux is important not only for practical reasons —you want your hardware to work with the software that you want to use— but also for ethical and political reasons. You can help the free software movement by purchasing hardware from manufacturers who support our goals and not purchasing from those who don’t.”
After reading the above mentioned protest message, I was a bit surprised to find several ATI Radeon cards on this list. Amongst others, my grumpy Radeon rv280 is listed. So, for the moment it looks like coincidentally I made a more or less OK choice.
Very helpful pages by the way.
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