Honest does not pay here...
Quoted 1 line · Andrew McGregor
I've had some discussion with an ex-NVidia guy who was there while
they
Quoted 3 lines
were doing the driver release.
They wanted to dual GPL/BSD license the kernel part in the first
place,
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then they realised they had a problem. They don't own the copyright
on all
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that code themselves, nor do they have the right to redistribute specs
for
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all of the hardware without NDA, because it consists in part of
purchased
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'IP blocks' (as hardware people call libraries). So in the end
they've
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opened up as far as they were allowed by preexisting constraints.
Remember, the hardware was not constructed with an open source driver
in
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mind. It's fairly easy to build hardware which can have open source drivers (you choose your IP block vendors carefully), but NVidia did
not do
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that in the first place, and now they are stuck.
So your belief about hardware is just plain false, unfortunately.
You're
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free not to buy their hardware, but I don't think you are being fair
to dis
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them when they appear to have gotten the point of open source but been stymied by other vendors. NVidia do try hard to give you the right to
use
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their stuff with Linux, but there is only so far they can go.
I expect if Linux makes them enough money, they might buy the rights
they
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don't have, and release the driver in full. But don't expect that to happen soon, because if you think proprietary software licenses can be expensive, you haven't seen hardware.
Andrew
Finally someone who explained this to everyone. Thanks Andrew you cleared this up to quite a few people.
Signature · 3 lines
Steven [email protected] GnuPG Fingerprint: 9357 F403 B0A1 E18D 86D5 2230 BB92 6D64 D516 0A94