Denis Leroy <denis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > There probably are patents involved, but those don't in general prevent > > open sourcing something unless you're on the wrong end of the stick. > Yup that's likely, and if they opened the code, we'd still have our > hands tied like with the MP3 code. Maybe. > OTOH, there's a trend lately of companies "pledging" their patents to > the Open Source community (Nokia, CA, IBM...). Would it help if Nvidia > did the same ? What if nVidia just /licensed/ the patents for use with their cards, not for /distributing source/? They may very well not even be their own. And there might also be "trade secrets" in there. OTOH, a friend of mine got to write a driver under NDA for the specs of the device and protocols to talk to it... which he claims aren't all that earth-shaking. But they came in form of photocopies of hastily printed pages with handwritten amendments and additions. His take is that they'd be ashamed to show the specs ;-) -- Dr. Horst H. von Brand User #22616 counter.li.org Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
