One other thing bothers me about knocking people for using the proprietary nVidia driver: nVidia didn't thumb their nose at Linux. Sure, we now have nouveau. But for a long time we didn't. And luckily for us, nVidia provided us with a Linux driver. No, it wasn't perfect. And it wasn't open source. And the build/install process was... err... But it worked ! It allowed us to run Linux on machines with nVidia hardware in ways that we wouldn't otherwise been able to. I could mention many, many other hardware vendors that didn't do this much ! And furthermore, they aren't hindering the nouveau process. I know they aren't actively helping it, but you have to remember how competitive the graphics card industry is and some of their advantage might be the IP in the driver. You can't blame them for keeping that secret. Its not like they are promoting a vendor lock in situation. I see that nVidia has just released 190-53 and that it appears to address some Linux specific concerns. Before we complain about how bad nVidia is, we might reflect on how much worse it could have been.
