Nouveau project fund

I've just pledged my $10 to the nouveau project fund to help replace the binary nvidia driver. This is unofficial i.e. the nouveau developers know about it, but the developers don't actually need that much cash for new hardware.
Initially I thought this was crazy, but after reading the blog entry by David Nielsen I think I understand.

We can say two things with this pledge:

  • People are willing to pay $10,000 of their own money to get a free driver. People don't want insecure binary crap.
  • Thank you to all the nouveau developers; I don't care if my $10 is not spent on hardware, but instead spent on alcohol and cigarettes. This is my way of saying thanks for doing this difficult and time consuming work. It's not easy coding on drm and Xorg without hardware specifications, and there's not that many people on the planet that could do this.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

One thought on “Nouveau project fund”

  1. Thank you Richard. Though note we are not paying for development, we are merely saying thank you to the developers for taking on a task no major vendor has wanted to support. If we want freedom we sometimes have to realise that it's not zero cost and we can't just sit back and whine about the fact that Red Hat/Canonical/Novell/etc. make money from Linux and as such should pay for our freedom to be ensured. I think it is entirely possible as a proof of concept, if it succeeds I have a hope that other people will band together to show their reverence for the benefits of freedom. I don't even own an nvidia card but I understand that they make up 50% of our market (MacSlow' poll showed us tht much) if we want a high impact first move, nvidia is it. Take the hubla over Fedora Legacy closing down, the people who want this clearly need to show their love for such a project to make it interesting to develop for some people. What if every minor webhost who uses Fedora (and there are a lot) banded together and paid for one fulltime employee to do this, how much would that cost per month per vendor.. would it be feasble. I surely think it would be.

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