In the world of ideals - a 3d video card with open source drivers

Currently I'm in between semesters at college so I've been catching up on my reading. In the December 2005 issue of Linux Journal, it was reported that there was a recent discussion about NVIDIA support in the kernel by the kernel hackers. Chris Wedgewood urged folks to boycott NVIDIA graphics cards. This is based on the reasoning that the company is "hostile to free software". According to Jeff Garzik "They are tthe only company that gives me zero information on their SATA controllers". Open source consumers, in Chris's opinion, need to give NVIDIA a message they can understand - we won't buy your hardware if you won't open up your drivers so it works on my chosen software.

This reminded me of my long standing frustration with hardware vendors, ideals, drivers, and getting my games working in Linux. Currently I'm running with an ATI Radeon 9500, and the best 3D performance comes from the binary ATI driver, charmingly named fglrx. I think it stands for Frustrated Geeks Love Real X. Or something. On the one hand, I really believe in the open source model and software libre. I believe in its ability to encourage technological advances which in turn encourages healthy free market competition. On the other hand, I really like World of Warcraft and have college software proggies that require that Other OS. I don't want to reboot every day to get all my work done. In the current reality of software, many cool games and other pieces of software don't yet have a native Linux client. The way I see it, I have three choices (listed in my order of preference)

1 - Emulation, requires no m$ license

2 - Xen, requires m$ license

3 - Dual-boot, requires praying to avoid losing my soul

My "Windows only" required software for class dictates that #2 is my best option. I can run my "thank you for making your software only run on only one vendor's OS may I have another" Cisco emulator without having to reboot. My gaming habit requires that I also have a graphics card capable of good 3D performance. For a long time now, the choice has really between NVIDIA or ATI, arguably choosing between two proprietary evils. At least the 3D is working fab with Mepis 3.4, so I don't have the "it just won't go" blues about 3D anymore. (Side note - just had to do a minor bit of tweaking to the xorg.conf file to get the proper resolutions on the two monitors but 3D worked out of the ISO).

So what's a grrl to do? I'd love to go all open source obviously. It doesn't look likely in the near future. Fortunately, this is a piece of hardware I probably won't have to invest in for another couple of years. This is OK, considering the college loans. But I'm a forwarding thinking kind of person, so I've been thinking over the video card thing for a while, and recalled that there was a company making video cards with open source drivers. A quick Google search found their name again for me - which appropriately was mentioned on the kerneltrap site. The company is called Tech Source and they had been talking on the linux kernel list about a graphics card with an open source driver since October of 2004. They were aiming for availability around June of 2005, and I see at least one of their cards, the Raptor 2100T which supports Linux PCs. It looks to have great 2D capabilities, but alas, I don't see anything about 3D rendering. The other cards seem to only support 2D as well. The company itself seems to be focused on specialty graphics cards, does not seem to have anything designed for the consumer sector, and the site reflects this.

So it seems that for the moment, my current choice of ATI remains the best one for me to balance useability with ideology. I'm still hopeful for a 3D card made by a company that puts out stable, reliable open-source drivers. Whatever company does is going to get my money when I upgrade my video card. Dad always called me an idealist. At least I took his advice not to hold my breath for things like this.