Wow. Stop reading a mailing list for two days and miss all the fun. ;-) On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 15:44 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote: [snip] > No offense, but I _am_ as much of an "apologist" for nVidia as Red > Hat, because there _are_ legal issues involved. Whether it's NDAs > or trademarks, sometimes the hands of people are tied by 3rd party, Without reading the rest of your message (or the rest of this thread) yet, I feel I should comment on this. I don't think anyone here has denied that there are legal issues involved and the nVidia's hands are tied. However, *they chose that path*, and for that, we can fault them. I recall an analogous example from about four years ago. I went to work for a small (6 or 7 people) software development firm. I was a sysadmin, but played kind of a dual role as backend developer as well. I can remember several conversations about what SDK to choose for our next feature set and constantly trying to explain to these rather uninformed developers of all the available free (many LGPL, so no real legal issues there) libraries out there to do what they wanted. It seemed that the immediate response to the question of 'we need a development SDK' was, 'who can we buy/license one from'. My first reaction, of course, was to hop over to sourceforge, freshmeat, and finally google to find something that did what they wanted, often finding better alternatives to the closed ones they wanted to pay an arm and a leg for. After a few months of this, I actually had one of the developers converted over to the idea of Free Software, and another one amazed at how much Free Software there was out there. nVidia chose it's path, and, yes, it's hard to reverse that now. But with projects like opengraphics.org and Intel's on board chipsets set to commoditize the graphics world, I don't believe the situation is as glum as some in this thread have implied. Unfortunately for nVidia and ATI, they may loose out in the end, but it won't be impossible for them to join the party. It'll just be a lot of back room negotiations to convince the stakeholders that they will no longer be able to compete without releasing the source code for their drivers without restrictive (or incompatible) licenses. On a related note, I don't know what this whole Fedora Foundation news is about specifically, but I do hope one thing. And that is that the Fedora principle of producing a distribution that is completely redistributable (both source and binary) without permission from some external third party remains an important goal. There aren't many distributions out there that stick to that goal. Debian is really the only one I can think of, at the moment, and I don't want to go there. But it's an important goal for me, and I suspect most of the old timers here on these lists (fedora-devel and fedora-test specifically). To me, it gives credence to the likes of SCO if we produce something that is not entirely redistributable, but then go ahead and redistribute it later. I don't know the nVidia driver license, but if we go down that path, I fear that we will be stepping onto a slippery slope. (Yes, I do see that no one's talking about shipping the nVidia driver, but even kowtowing to their whims, or slowness in keeping is going to do nothing but slow us down.) Let's not go there. Please. -- -Paul Iadonisi Senior System Administrator Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist Ever see a penguin fly? -- Try Linux. GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
