21 Jun
2006
21 Jun
'06
11:18 p.m.
On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 02:47 +0200, Thomas Ilnseher wrote:
Lee Revell wrote:
They put it in there because on Windows, vendors are free to put any
damn thing in a kernel driver (I've seen Windows drivers that contain a
full AC3 decoder that uses floating point math), and their legal
strategy to get around the GPL is to make the Linux nvidia driver a GPL
wrapper around the same binary blob the Windows driver uses. This way
it can't be considered a derivative work of the kernel and thus the GPL
does not require them to make the source available. (Disclaimer: IANAL,
this is all hearsay and certainly has not been tested in court)
If you run strings on nvidia.o you can see HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in
there :-P
Lee
On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 12:44 -0500, Gian Paolo
Mureddu wrote:
at least the file sizes imply that you are right.
i can guess why they have put it in there ...
but this does change the light in which the driver shines ... However for the video drivers, as was said in
another post to this
thread by Rob, nVidia and ATi are not releasing specs for their
hardware for Open Source drivers due to incarnate battle over
features, price and performance... I would have to assume that an Open
Source driver initiative on at least the kernel end would be
tremendously helpful to prevent lockups and ease debugging, not to
mention that installing their binary X drivers would be much easier,
after all the kernel module pretty much is only a bridge between the X
driver and the hardware, the magic is done in the X driver, not the
kernel gateway (or am I terribly wrong here?)
Unfortunately you are wrong. The nvidia kernel module contains a full
OpenGL implementation :-P