mynextlaptop
Have you got the slightest idea of the amount of money that such big companies manage every day?! Do you really think you can change something in their decisions?!
For Nvidia, the price of supporting open drivers with hardware specs (and possibly sourcecode) would be minimal. So for them it is better to support open drivers than to loose an even minimal part of their customers. Obviously, it all depends on how much this campaign will have success.
It will never work, Linux users are not enough to make the difference.
Linux users' number grows very fast. Still, they are a small percentage of the world computer users. But how about the percentage of the world webmasters?
Ok, why are you doing this? You've been (secretely) payed by Intel or ATI/AMD?
No. I started doing this because I had payed for a laptop with an X200M ATI card and was not able to run Beryl/Compiz decently on it. And I know lot of people still in a similar situation. So I am the first person that will never buy an Nvidia graphic card until things change.
Notice that my sister has a laptop with a (more economic) Intel graphic card, where Beryl runs perfectly.
What about nouveau open-source drivers? If you boycott Nvidia, you are boycotting them too!
Clearly not. Developers of this project do a great job, and produce in general very good software. Still, free drivers don't support all card models and all cards' features. People who write them could work much better if they owned the hardware specification and weren't obliged to take all their informations from reverse-engineering. And this is why this site exists.
So are you related to nouveau developers?
Indeed I would like to help them with this campaign, but I personally never entered in contact with them.
We want those sources from ATI and Nvidia! Giving us the specs isn't/wouldn't be enough!
The most frequent reasons that ATI and Nvidia adduce to justify the fact that they don't release the source of their drivers is that they come collaborations with other companies, and are partially protected by non-disclosure agreements. So the natural answer is "give us at least the hardware specifications", so that nouveau open drivers can be improved.
Obviously, Intel will remain a positive example because they develop open source Linux drivers. So ATI and Nvidia have an example to follow.