Even today if you use the API your program has to link to Mesa's libgbm.so as opposed to linking to a library provided by the graphics driver like libEGL.so.
How can you call all of that a mischaracterization? In my humble opinion, and I am not anything more than a bystander in this with only superficial knowledge of the domain, it's you that is trying to mischaracterize the situation.
Yes, it does and it is different the the well defined meaning when talking in regards to the software itself. OpenGL is an open API, but the source code for an implementation isn't necessarily open.
>Nvidia was not willing to implement an API for their drivers
They couldn't because this API is a part of Mesa itself. As I mentioned programs link to a Mesa library directly.
>since Mesa is not an actual GPU vendor
They are a driver vendor.
>the other vendors (Intel and AMD at this point), which have already implemented GBM
Support was added to Mesa itself and not to the driver's by those companies. The proprietary, now deprecated, AMD kernel module still doesn't support GBM.
>should switch too in the name of this
I think it is beneficial for standards to be implemented by multiple vendors, so I think they should implement it at least.
>How can you call all of that a mischaracterization?
What people think as Nvidia needing to implement an API is actually an ask for Nvidia to make a Mesa API work.
From my perception essentially the ask was that Nvidia needed to open source the kernel driver like AMD did and then eventually a nvidia gbm backend would be built into Mesa for it. For obvious reasons this was never going to happen. The fact that no agreeable solution was figured out in about a decade, and then Nvidia has to code up that solution for the Mesa project is a failure on Mesa's end. A lot of user pain happened due due to them not willing to work together with proprietary software and focusing solely on supporting open source drivers.
Well, I guess this is the crux of the problem, and for open-source enthusiasts like me this is not obvious at all. What we can surmise is that Nvidia refused to collaborate, therefore they were the party to blame for the status of their video cards not being supported as well as others' vendors on linux.
