Hi Simon, On 2026-03-25 10:58, Simon Richter wrote: > I'd argue that long-term, the interests of our users and of the free > software community are always aligned because only free software can > ensure that our users' needs will also be met in the future.
Though I share the idealistic thought behind this, I think it is contradicted by reality. As we've seen plenty of times, having access to the source in no way ensures that our users' needs will also be met. Our BTS is full of reports of our users' needs, unanswered. You also need the people to work on the source. And sometimes, proprietary companies are the only ones that can commit the necessary resources to do so. Case in point: > The various nVidia graphics cards I have collected over the years have > slowly fallen out of support by the non-free drivers, but they are still > perfectly good cards -- so as a user, I rely on the free software > community after vendor support has run out. AMD also can't keep up with supporting their consumer-grade GPUs -- if they were ever supported at all. (Flagship ones were/are on certain platforms, but "lesser" ones don't seem to be). From my own experience owning various AMD and NVIDIA cards, NVIDIA's support for consumer cards has historically been substantially better, especially older models. A GPGPU compute stack, including drivers, is such a complex beast that it is hard to imagine anyone beyond the vendor even capable of devoting the resources to maintaining it. Or another point: there are probably still a ton of i386 CPUs out there but support has dropped from even big-name projects. This is not a source problem; this is a resource problem. Best, Christian
