nVidia's policies suck (Was Re: 12 inch powerbook with nividia 32 mg vidioe card)

[Duke Robillard]

On Dec 8, 2003, at 12:18 AM, Atro Tossavainen wrote:

>>Sorry Patrick.  nVidia is to blame.
>>
>>I repeat, nVidia alone is to blame.
>>
>>If I didn't make myself clear yet, nVidia really needs to get a clue.
>>    
>>
>It seems like it would be technically feasible to write a shim to call 
>the binary nVidia drivers provided with Darwin. It actually wouldn't be 
>nVidia specific. It would just be a thin layer to make drivers think 
>that they were being called from Darwin.
>

Recently, there was discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list about
this kind of thing.  Linus Torvalds himself weighed in, saying that he
thinks drivers designed specifically for Linux should be considered
part of the kernel ("a derivative work" was the phrase in question), and
therefore are covered by GPL, no matter what the company that writes
them thinks.  He doesn't think binary-only, closed source drivers
should be allowed, although he's never actually gone through the
process of starting a lawsuit about it, which would probably be the only
way to be sure.

Duke