These are hookers… just expensive ones

That’s just how the world works.

And that’s kind of the discussion here.

Some people are annoyed at the Linux Devs because “fuck it, everyone breaks the law and it doesn’t matter”. Some people are annoyed at Nvidia because they’d like to uphold or social contracts.

In don’t think it’s naive to want to live in a world and support a society that supports the law. I do think we have bigger issues that people are happy with this behaviour and are actively defending it.

If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you’ve got other issues.

Nvidia could choose to follow the law, their customers could choose to support them in that.

Part of the reason you can’t replace Nvidia, is because they get ahead by breaking the law. This makes it harder to compete with them.

Now you’re stuck with only Nvidia, and welcome to monopoly hell. A bit exaggerated I know, but it’s his it happens.

Nvidia could choose to improve performance using non-illegal tactics.

They haven’t.

I’m happy to live in a society wherev we support those upholding the law.

don’t expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux

The group to be annoyed at are Nvidia. Plain and simple.

Microsoft did this with browsers.

HTML was a thing, that was implemented by other browsers at the time. Netscape Navigator (the precursor to Firefox) was a thing that already did HTML well. It could access the world wide web, and was the defacto standard.

Microsoft introduced internet explorer, bundled with Windows. At first, internet explorer was not as good/complete/compatible as Netscape Navigator. Over time, it got better almost to parity. But it also added new features, features not in the HTML specification. They were not added to the specification, and how IE would use those features was not made public. So Netscape could not implement them.

Users started to expect those features.

Over time, more webpages would break on Netscape than on IE. Web designers wanted the fancy new features of ie. So users moved away from Netscape.

If only a number of technical users care about something, that the “mainstream” (for want of a better word) doesn’t care about. Then things work less and less for the techies.

Meta could do the same with the Fediverse. As they already have market domination in other markets, they can introduce a lot of users to our “safe space”. But be real if posts stop working and you as a techie knows it’s because Meta have done something funky, Grandbob Jim isn’t likely to care. Grandbob Jim will continue to use what “works”. And some of the less techie of us will be forced to move to the MetaFediVerse to talk to our Grandbobs.