Petitions To Release Free NVIDIA and ATI Drivers for Linux

Add you voice to to these petitions asking the likes of NVIDIA and ATI to provide drivers that are open source. At the moment, Nvidia has released its 3-D enabled driver as a binary object file along with some C wrappers for compatibility, these are called binary blobs, as well as a modified version of SGI's OpenGL library. While this solution is the best one besides having an open-source driver, it does have many problems.

If you would like to more information on Non free Linux binary blobs or would like to add you voice to the growing numbers of people that want graphics and other drivers to become open source software please visit these sites below.

NVIDIA Petition So far no comment one way or the other has been heard from NVidia, regrettable really because NVidia has a strong user base within the Linux community and for the most part always have done.

ATI Petition Note! AMD the owners of ATI have kindly agreed to provide true 'OpenSource' driver's for their future range of Graphics cards R5xx and R6xx GPUs, this is a step much in the right direction but falls considerably short of the mark when it comes to the large number of Video Graphics Cards that will not be supported. SoSLUG very much hopes these drivers will be available and continue to be available to the OpenSource community for the benifit of all. However we suggest you continue to petition both of these company's to apply pressure to resolve the lack of Open Source drivers for these essential and necessary graphic's cards.

AMD's own Press release can be viewed here

A RedHat Press release can be viewed here

It is unlikely that xserver will ever be easy to install and configure, however with the co-operation of corporations such as NVIDIA and ATI this configuration task may be more reliable, dependable and perhaps less complex.

How Does the BBC See the Linux User

This image was copied from TheRegister.co.uk 6th November 2007 and kind of explains things a bit.
You can read the full article here at theregister.co.uk We at SoSLUG have already petitioned for a BBCplayer to be made available to the Linux community similar to that enjoyed by Windows users, the various Governing bodies have indicated all OS platforms to be supported, will the BBC ever produce a player for Linux?

BBC Digital Rights and the Plod

There have been some 16,078 consumers protesting against the BBC from abandoning or dismissing the users of the Linux OS to the Prime Minister back in August 2007, this petition has now closed and can be viewed here. As a result of this petition an independent body of the BBC determined that the BBC should support all OS systems not just Windows or the Mac. It seems that the BBC are of the opinion that this is something that should be tried but if they fail well it only a few hundred users if that!

The UK Government have released a response to the online petition to prevent the BBC making the iPlayer Windows only. The government state that the "BBC Trust made it a condition of approval for the BBC's on-demand services that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems" and they will "measure the BBC's progress on this"....

This seems quite a strong statement however the range as demanded may not include Linux.

An excerpt the BBC Trust Public Value Assessment

Having taken receipt of the MIA and the PVA, the Trust proceeded to the third stage of the
process and drew provisional conclusions in the PVT. In doing so, the Trust made
modifications aimed at reducing adverse market impacts and increasing the public value of
the proposals. This was so that the Trust could be satisfied that any likely adverse market
impacts would be justified by the likely public value. In particular:

• limitations were applied to the proposal to allow users to “stack series” - i.e. download all episodes of a series beyond the seven-day catch-up period;
• the length of time users could store a programme file before viewing it was reduced from 13 weeks to 30 days;
• seven-day catch-up television over the internet, which relies on digital rights management licensing provided by Microsoft, was required to be made available to users of Apple and Linux operating systems within a reasonable timeframe, which the Trust proposed should be two years;
• book readings and classical music were excluded from the proposals for audio downloads;
• provision was required to be made to help parents protect children from unsuitable content;
• content was required to be provided to third-parties on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis.

The full "Public Value assessment" document can be viewed at the bottom of this page however you will need to register to download this file.