What has to be said has to be said.
Linus Torvalds drops F-bomb on NVIDIA
Linus Torvalds has exhorted GPU-maker NVIDIA to indulge in sexual intercourse with itself, and angrily raised his middle finger to the company to re-enforce the suggestion. Torvalds' “remarks” were made last week during a live interview at Finland's Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship. After the interview, Torvalds took …
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Monday 18th June 2012 09:14 GMT Ben Tasker
@AC
Depends on the situation really dunnit.
If Steve * (yeah ok, if Jobs did it it'd be newsworthy for a different reason) were to swear at NVIDIA for the same reason, most would probably agree.
If any of them walk on stage and shout {INSERT OS} is the dog's fucking bollocks then yes it'd be unprofessional and laughable.
The thing about swearing, is it's just language. Just like every other word, phrase or sentence, there are times when it's appropriate and times when it isn't. Given the NVIDIA use Linux but flatly refuse to help provide GPU support, I'd say it's a reasonable comment.
Swearing is only offensive when you say it to/near the wrong person
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Monday 18th June 2012 13:51 GMT sisk
Re: @AC
What you say used to be true. Not since shortly after AMD bought out ATI have ATI's Linux drivers been flaky, however. One of the first things AMD with ATI did was massively improve their Linux drivers. I had an ATI card at the time and when that first AMD Catalyst driver came out the difference it made on my system was amazing. Last time I used an Nvidia card the OSS nv driver was far better than the official driver, and it's nowhere near good enough for gaming (yes, I game on Linux). As for Intel, I really can't comment on their drivers since I only settle for Intel graphics when I'm setting up headless systems without X.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 01:35 GMT theJML
Re: @AC
Exactly. I have been stuck with ATI devices at work for years and have had nothing but issue after issue with them in Linux. Meanwhile at home I have had a slew of nothing but nVidia cards just because of their near flawless support for the Linux community. Thanks to them actually coming out with drivers for Linux on a regular basis, I've been running 3D accelerated X windows setup for at least 8 years now.
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Monday 18th June 2012 14:03 GMT Homer 1
Re: Thumbs up for his wonderful gesture
Yes, it's nice to see Nvidia and its apologists unambiguously chastised for their Free Software hostility by the big man himself.
Maybe now we can start to cure the disease of pragmatism that afflicts so many Linux users. Until now, I'd assumed Linus was one of them, but apparently he's not as apathetic about the binary-blob problem as he seemed.
That's good news for Free Software supporters, who've become increasingly marginalised by pragmatic Linux users over the last few years, most of whom were formerly vindicated by Linus' apparent support for their pragmatic cause.
Now it's the pragmatists' turn to be marginalised.
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Monday 18th June 2012 14:43 GMT Sean Timarco Baggaley
Re: Thumbs up for his wonderful gesture
You, and people like you, are part of the problem, not the solution.
If you'd bothered to watch the rest of that video linked in the article, you'd have seen that Linus himself wasn't particularly fussed about the 'closed' nature of games consoles. He even went so far as to say that different rules applied in that sector.
Open Source is not a religion. It's just a form of distribution; nothing more, nothing less. It will not usurp every other form of distribution. Not everything that can be given away for free* should be.
* (Terms & Conditions Apply. Strings may be attached. See attached license. Unless you're giving stuff away to the Public Domain, in which case, no terms and conditions apply, and no strings, or licenses, are attached.)
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Monday 18th June 2012 16:10 GMT Homer 1
Re: "the problem"
That depends on how you define "the problem".
There's a problem for consumers who are unceremoniously denied access to their own property, when the manufacturer arbitrarily withdraws "support" for the means necessary to use it - a problem virtually unheard of outside the computing market. That's merely a perfectly legitimate consumer issue, and has nothing to do with "religious fanaticism".
That's the true essence of Free Software: autonomy. Nvidia doesn't "give" its hardware away, it sells it. Free Software is not about "giving it away", its about ensuring autonomy from the vendor, so that consumers can continue to use their legally purchased property in spite of the vendor's machinations.
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Monday 18th June 2012 06:43 GMT George 20
Great now we have a child
So now we have the creator of Linux kernel acting like a 13 year old child pulling the middle finger and saying things like F-U to corporate entities. Now it's all public and permanently imprinted on the net and on his life.
Like damn, he could have been a little less vulgar about it. He could have said the same thing without being a little kid about it. So now he gave Linux a reputation of being rude little sh*t when things bother them. Linus forgets that his actions reflect on the entire community, I wonder what RedHat, IBM, Intel ...etc think about this since they are some of the largest contributors to the kernel.
Thumbs down because I expected better.
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Monday 18th June 2012 06:59 GMT Nextweek
Re: Great now we have a child
Linus for years has been tempered about this response to binary drivers. I think this move, whilst vulgar, is a very clever ploy. This is going to get so much wider press than a kernel developer complaining about closed source code. Shareholders, CEO's and higher level managers might actually think that nVidia has a bad reputation if this hits main stream news.
Linus is cutting through the corporate culture so someone might actually listen.
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Monday 18th June 2012 07:24 GMT Combat Wombat
Re: Great now we have a child
". Shareholders, CEO's and higher level managers might actually think that nVidia has a bad reputation if this hits main stream news."
It would be true if they gave a crap about the Linux market.
No one cares about linux neckbeards.
Of course Nvidia don't give two craps about the linux market, because most games don't run on Linux anyway. And what to Nvidia sell ? high end graphics cards aimed at gaming. And a drive set that has to be redone every three months, to work with a buggy kernel, for 10 different forks of linux.
Boo hoo.... who bother with an OS that is 1% of the desktop market? Lots of money and f'ing about for now reward..
I am with nvidia on this one.
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Monday 18th June 2012 07:38 GMT Scob
Re: Great now we have a child
You must be a cave man because the market has been shifting away from desktops for quite some time now. The mobile and tablet market is where the game is and NVidia needs to get with it. I used to be a bit of an NVidia fan, but even the quality of their closed source drivers these days leaves a lot to be desired.
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Monday 18th June 2012 08:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Great now we have a child
LOL! You don't know anything about the high-end gaming market. People using more than one video cards with multiple monitors and tons of hardware - including dedicated controls. They aren't moving to mobile or tablets anytime soon to play a simple game using fingers like two-years old. And those systems don't run Linux .
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Monday 18th June 2012 08:41 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: Great now we have a child
Combat Wombat wrote: "Of course Nvidia don't give two craps about the linux market, because most games don't run on Linux anyway ... Boo hoo.... who bother with an OS that is 1% of the desktop market? Lots of money and f'ing about for now reward..I am with nvidia on this one"
Graphics cards are now doing more than just high-end gaming. It's still in its infancy but CUDA, OpenCL... For some application spaces it's useful to have a high-end graphics card even if you don't game. And that application space is growing through a big growth at the moment. And who knows more about this than most userbases? The Linux userbase which is primarily made up of technically competent people.
Also, that "1% of the market" that you refer to has an influence beyond what you'd expect, being made up of very technical people who advise and probably buy more than most non-technical people. Also, if you as a CEO said to your shareholders: "I'm not going to bother with that - it's only 1% of our $600million annual business, so merely $6million a year I can't be bothered with", you would be sacked. Sacked for your behaviour and most definitely sacked for your attitude.
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Monday 18th June 2012 09:27 GMT foo_bar_baz
@Combat Wombat
You didn't read/listen did you? Nvidia want to sell chips to Android manufacturers. Which kernel does Android use again?
Linux is used everywhere from TVs to phones, Hollywood renderfarms and GPU-based supercomputing. Nvidia drivers are needed by others than Linux desktop gamers, wake up.
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Monday 18th June 2012 15:55 GMT Rick Giles
Re: Great now we have a child
How do you figure lots of money and no reward? If they open the code base to the community, it will take care of itself. You seem to not know anything about FOSS, or Linux people for that matter. Neckbeards is an untrue statement about Linux admins/users that the uneducated have heard about Unix admins/users.
I for one will make sure not to buy any nVidia hardware for any system, Linux or Windows, until they (nVidia) perform a cranial rectal extraction and see what the rest of the world is really wanting and doing. Until then, they can self fornicate.
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Monday 18th June 2012 08:14 GMT Rich 2
Arrggghhhh!!!!
The Linux people have brought this on themselves. They have been allowing binary blobs (mostly drivers) into the code-base for years. The argument for this is, of course, that it allows Linux to acquire functionality that would otherwise be denied. While I can see the argument, the ultimate conclusion of this action is that you'll finally end up in the situation where more and more hardware manufacturers do the same thing, to the point where you don't have the source code for ANY of the drivers in your kernel! Which is a ridiculous situation.
I've recently been looking at putting together a Linux box for running MythTV. I very quickly found out that it's a non-trivial exercise getting the video to work. Apparently, Radeon chips are a non-starter which (many people agree) is a real shame because they have (arguably) much superior video post-processing capabilities compared to nVidia. the point is, we have here and now, a situation where critical bits of hardware will not work with Linux without the use of the respective blob. And the blobs are typically buggy, lack critical functionality, or fail to work for some other complex reason. And there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it.
The BSDs have been campaigning for years to not allow blobs in. FreeBSD (I think) ended up relenting, but OpenBSD has stood their ground. And yes, you could point and laugh and say "oh, yes, but so-and-so doesn't work on openBSD", and you might be right, but at least they have all the code for ALL their drivers, which is a lot more than Linux can say (and by the way, OBSD has far better WiFi Support than Linux). OpenBSD dropped support for Adaptec disc driver chips some years ago because after many frustrating years of trying to get enough info out of them just so a driver could be written, they finally lost patience and decided it wasn't worth it. On the other hand, OBSD has had some major successes getting h/w manufacturers to release the required info. If Linux took the same tack, then by now there would be some very big players video / ethernet / wifi manufacturers getting their fingers out and releasing this sort of info because the cost to them if they don't is loss of sales.
Many people have been saying for years that there should be a licensing clause in the Linux OS to prevent blob inclusion (but then again, this should not be needed - it's Linux people's short-sightedness and impatience that is the problem). And now that Linux is becoming much more important, we're in a mess that we can not be able to get out of, and are being held to ransom.
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Monday 18th June 2012 09:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Arrggghhhh!!!!
At least with Linux I can relatively safely buy a discounted mass market PC where the Microsoft tax is cheaper than the cost of researching and assembling or purchasing dedicated hardware and expect it to install and run Linux without issues. Keeping anti-Linux manufacturers like Nvidia away from my purchasing money (and purchases I recommend to friends, family and community for Linux and non Linux purposes) isn't too difficult given that enough mass PC assemblers say what they use at that level. With an OS where manufacturer blobs are not supported and having to stick with a supported hardware list, I'd probably have to get a specialist to build the system for me.
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Monday 18th June 2012 09:23 GMT DJ Smiley
Re: Arrggghhhh!!!!
Whats the size comparison of usage of Linux against the BSD's?
When I started with linux, I came from a windows system where everything worked, most of the time (unbelievable for some, I know!).
I tried out nouveau a few years ago and it was terrible. It'd kernel panic and die pretty much every boot. If you'd told me "well you can't have the nvidia binary drivers" then I'd of gone back to windows.
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Monday 18th June 2012 10:55 GMT DrXym
Re: Arrggghhhh!!!!
It's not like the kernel bends over backwards for binaries. The basic rule is that anything is not source code is unsupported and the ABI can and does break from one release to the next. So Nvidia might get away with releasing a binary driver but they suffer a greater pain in supporting it since they have to ensure that it works with a variety of kernels. Users also suffer because if the kernel changes they may discover their binary is broken too and they need to go get a new one, often with little assistance from the distro.
But binary blobs might be suboptimal but they're still better than nothing. There ARE occasions that for whatever reason a hardware manufacturer cannot or will not provide the source code for a driver. Banning binaries might please open source purists but it's not always a practical answer.
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Monday 18th June 2012 08:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Great now we have a child
There are plenty of stories of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs going absolutely bat shit crazy going around. Bill Gates going ape privately about the PS3 not using DirectX, and Steve Jobs vowing thermonuclear war vs Android, again privately. Linux just made sure his comments were open sourced.
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Monday 18th June 2012 07:10 GMT The Fuzzy Wotnot
Re: Great now we have a child
Oh stop being so bloody po-faced!
Sometimes being nice doesn't work, sometimes being Mr Nice simply gets you walked all over. So long as he doesn't keep doing things like this I think it's nice to see someone who's usually viewed as just another quiet geek showing a little "nerd rage" for a change.
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Monday 18th June 2012 07:15 GMT George 20
Re: Great now we have a child
Linus doesn't have to be nice, he doesn't have to act like a kid to get his message across. There is a difference between telling someone to go fu*k themselves and saying the same thing without swearing.
He's done similar things with Gnome and SuSE but didn't get to this level. Sorry but you treat people the way you want to be treated.
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Monday 18th June 2012 09:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Great now we have a child
Bollocks!
Using expletives is part of our language, and it's there for a purpose - to add emphasis (unless it s along the lines of "I was fucking walking down the fucking road and this fucking fucker says "OI! where the fuck you fucking going?"").
Torvalds' comments were a clear expression of his annoyance with nVidia, and his choice of words carried this emotion to us.
(BTW you're talking crap about Live Aid "being wiped out").
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