NVIDIA Loses Huge GPU Order Due To Linux Blob

Hardon wrote:

<http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...TEyNTE>

<quote>
NVIDIA has lost an order of at least ten million graphics cards
because their GeForce/Quadro driver is closed-source.

It's been a very interesting week in the binary Linux graphics world
with Linus Torvalds calling NVIDIA the worst company ever along with
making colorful comments about the green company, NVIDIA's bullshit
response, and then on the opposite side of the table was XBMC
developers publicly pointing out the problems with AMD
Catalyst. Ending out Friday, assuming nothing else interesting takes
place this weekend in the duopoly Linux graphics card battle, is word
of NVIDIA losing a huge order due to their binary blob.

The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to
order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that
the GeForce / Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux
x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra
driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to
their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the
Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the
code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order.
</quote>

The lost order was worth up to half billion dollars.

It raises extremely serious questions about closed source companies
and their failing business models and whether they are of any
use to investors in the future.

Open source companies grow faster and become giants in just
a few short years compared to closed source companies.
Most of the giant corporations that rely on technology
is supported on all pillars by open source.
Whether thats appil, amazon, google, facebook, ibm, AMD, samsung, etc,
the bulk of their revenue is down to open source.

The winners of tomorrow are those that use Linux and open
source even more effectively. If I were a sporting investor,
I'd be paying a visit to all the open source companies out there
and looking carefully at companies that can scale rapidly
on the back of open source and rake in the revenue.
If I had investments in companies with closed source, I'd
be looking at ways to promote the open source guys and give
them a forum and an audience to see how they would make more
money than closed source failing business models.

The things that slow down growth of open source companies
these days are the extremely negative operations carried
out by closed source companies using corporate resources.
If I were an investor in a closed source company,
I would be looking to curtail all of that by not signing
any of it off, and informing the wider world what is being
brewed by closed source that is a threat to open source.,
and putting more money into open source companies
that have solutions to the inevitable damage caused
by negative operations.