NVIDIA's NVLink Fusion Stays Proprietary, Third Parties Can Only Work Around It

[TheinsanegamerN]

The only reason why open source doesn't dominate every single aspect of computing is because of binary blobs and vendor lock-in. Mesa shits on proprietary Radeon drivers but NVK will probably never be good.

I remember being in high school, thinking that the only reason that Windows was dominant was because of the evil corporations and their lock ins.

Then reality set in. No, lock in is not the "only reason". Most closed source software has open alternatives, here's the thing, those alternatives usually SUCK due to underdevelopment, because the FOSS bros cant wrap their mind around the idea that, if a corpo is going to invest million in development of a tool, they're not going to make it open for others to use. And if a single corporation does open source their tool, but requires licenses and actively pursues protecting their work, you'll whine and complain about "muh control, muh lockin" anyway.

MESA is actually a great example. Until AMD opened their drivers up, MESA sucked ballz, nvidia's blob actually worked right. So guess who dominated in linux for decades? Right, nVidia, despite all the FOSS screeching, because MESA simply didnt compete. Once AMD opened their hardware up it took about 2 years to really catch up to nvidia.

Gee I wonder why the multi billion dollar corpos didnt want to wait 20 years for the FOSS community to make functional AMD drivers? It's a mysteree, I tell ye!

Somebody's not paying attention to the literature. FOSS (now FLOSS because of people like you) is free as in freedom, NOT free as in free beer. I guess you should tell Red Hat their business model isn't sustainable either.

"people like me" (thanks babe, luv u 2 )

Also, you still havent answered my question. Do you assume people in this FLOSS world work for free? If not, who is funding them?

No they don't. Strong market support isn't a guarantee for any system, proprietary or not.

Closed systems tend to have much stronger support (Windows, Adobe, nVidia, ece) which plays a major roll in their success. "Go look at the forums" is not an acceptable support answer for a corporate environment, and most open source tools have no single company supporting them, so who do you call?

 

[Vayra86]

No they don't. Strong market support isn't a guarantee for any system, proprietary or not.

There are no guarantees in software. Or in business. Or in Open Source.

Open source is something I do prefer - at the same time, I'll generally lean towards whatever works best, or at least, works good enough. Stuff that does not work well enough, honestly? Even if its free I don't want it. What's the point?

Live example. RDNA3 and its overall support/game stability is on the level of 'it works good enough' and at that point I'll vouch for the underdog in a marketplace to do my share of rebalancing. However minor. So I bought a 7900XT even with Nvidia having compelling offers at similar price point. But I do get why the vast majority doesn't and instead empowers the closed-source / proprietary based company. The products are, honestly, a bit better. For my performance needs and situation though, the 'better' aspect barely if ever comes into play. But still, I could probably have bought a better GPU, I'm not gonna lie to myself about that and even dedicated AMD buyers should have gotten that reality check at some point. And then, a half year later you get the message RDNA4 isn't going to be much if anyhing but a refinement at same performance. You see the late-to-market featureset grow, but very slowly. Every time, it confirms a lack of dedication... and for good reasons. AMD's strategy adjustment is understandable... but its not nice. If there's barely a user group to support, where will the support go?

The best guarantee you can get for any OS or applicative support period is simply market penetration/popularity. If it gets used, it gets supported. If more people use it, the support is more expansive and will cover an overwhelmingly larger number of use cases than one that is used by a few handful of people, however dedicated they are.

Its not illogical is it... but it has absolutely no relation, like zero with whether or not something is open source.

What you DO get with open source is an everlasting opportunity for someone to pick up the pieces and do work on it. But if that isn't brought into practice, again... what's the advantage or where's the supposed guarantee that open source offers?

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

There are no guarantees in software. Or in business. Or in Open Source.

Open source is something I do prefer - at the same time, I'll generally lean towards whatever works best, or at least, works good enough. Stuff that does not work well enough, honestly? Even if its free I don't want it. What's the point?

Live example. RDNA3 and its overall support/game stability is on the level of 'it works good enough' and at that point I'll vouch for the underdog in a marketplace to do my share of rebalancing. However minor. So I bought a 7900XT even with Nvidia having compelling offers at similar price point. But I do get why the vast majority doesn't and instead empowers the closed-source / proprietary based company. The products are, honestly, a bit better. For my performance needs and situation though, the 'better' aspect barely if ever comes into play. But still, I could probably have bought a better GPU, I'm not gonna lie to myself about that and even dedicated AMD buyers should have gotten that reality check at some point. And then, a half year later you get the message RDNA4 isn't going to be much if anyhing but a refinement at same performance. You see the late-to-market featureset grow, but very slowly. Every time, it confirms a lack of dedication... and for good reasons. AMD's strategy adjustment is understandable... but its not nice. If there's barely a user group to support, where will the support go?

The best guarantee you can get for any OS or applicative support period is simply market penetration/popularity. If it gets used, it gets supported. If more people use it, the support is more expansive and will cover an overwhelmingly larger number of use cases than one that is used by a few handful of people, however dedicated they are.

Its not illogical is it... but it has absolutely no relation, like zero with whether or not something is open source.

What you DO get with open source is an everlasting opportunity for someone to pick up the pieces and do work on it. But if that isn't brought into practice, again... what's the advantage or where's the supposed guarantee that open source offers?

Open source can also bring its own issues, like when nobody can agree on how to handle a package manager....which is why linux has 6. All that labor duplicated and wasted because we cant decide if a .deb or .sun is better. If a project stalls or goes in a bad direction, you can fork it, but you can also end up with a bunch of forks none of which are getting anywhere. Or that incident where someone in china was trying to slip spyware into some linux package that got caught because one autistic guy at MS could not accept the 1ms latency increase that resulted.

Especially for corporate use, a few hours of downtime can cost far more than you'd ever save. So whomever has the best support gets the attention, and closed source providers do have an advantage of control over their software and updates making support easier to give, which then leads to people gravitating to said solution.

 

[chrcoluk]

Open source can also bring its own issues, like when nobody can agree on how to handle a package manager....which is why linux has 6. All that labor duplicated and wasted because we cant decide if a .deb or .sun is better. If a project stalls or goes in a bad direction, you can fork it, but you can also end up with a bunch of forks none of which are getting anywhere. Or that incident where someone in china was trying to slip spyware into some linux package that got caught because one autistic guy at MS could not accept the 1ms latency increase that resulted.

Especially for corporate use, a few hours of downtime can cost far more than you'd ever save. So whomever has the best support gets the attention, and closed source providers do have an advantage of control over their software and updates making support easier to give, which then leads to people gravitating to said solution.

Yep this is a fair point, I absolutely despise systemd, ease of use completely out of the window, I feel these type of issues where something ends up designed for the developers needs over the end user tends to not happen on large proprietry projects, its a weakness of community open source projects.

 

[Rover4444]

MESA is actually a great example. Until AMD opened their drivers up, MESA sucked ballz

Yes. Thank you for proving my point.

Also, you still havent answered my question. Do you assume people in this FLOSS world work for free? If not, who is funding them?

Nobody works for free. The people who want their software to *do things* funds development. You seem to have some sort of mistaken belief that just because something is open source developers can't get paid and corporations can't fund it's development. Weird.

Closed systems tend to have much stronger support (Windows, Adobe, nVidia, ece) which plays a major roll in their success. "Go look at the forums" is not an acceptable support answer for a corporate environment, and most open source tools have no single company supporting them, so who do you call?

The system administrator so he can roll back any changes then a contractor for anything beyond that. Software doesn't just break suddenly, and it doesn't actually *need* development once it's mature.

The best guarantee you can get for any OS or applicative support period is simply market penetration/popularity. If it gets used, it gets supported. If more people use it, the support is more expansive and will cover an overwhelmingly larger number of use cases than one that is used by a few handful of people, however dedicated they are.

Its not illogical is it... but it has absolutely no relation, like zero with whether or not something is open source.

I agree on all points. I prefer the open source alternative when possible, but if it's not a true alternative for my needs then I'll just buy the closed implementation regardless. I'm not going to stop using CUDA just because ROCm exists with half the features for what I want to do.

What you DO get with open source is an everlasting opportunity for someone to pick up the pieces and do work on it. But if that isn't brought into practice, again... what's the advantage or where's the supposed guarantee that open source offers?

That is the advantage. You can modify, distribute, and utilize the software to your heart's content whenever and wherever you want. And with AI tools, it's at the very least easier than ever for non-programmers to try developing it. Closed software isn't immune to a lack of development either, but the biggest difference is you couldn't fix it even if you wanted to (unless you're okay with breaking a few laws).