On Wed, 2006-06-07 at 22:43 -0500, Jan Depner wrote: > They may not have used OSS. It's possible that they wrote their > own drivers for audio. Personally, I'm all in favor of anyone using > Linux for audio in any form or fashion. Of course, I hope that they > built upon the work that has been done before by the people involved > in ALSA and JACK but I can be magnanimous about it. The best case > scenario is that they open source everything they've been doing but I > can live with closed packages on top of Linux as long as it promotes > the use of Linux in audio as opposed to Micro$oft. We both know that > Linux is a far superior solution for audio, the more the "unwashed > masses" see Linux as "the" solution for audio the closer we are to > unseating the reigning king (HA) of operating systems. "The enemy of > my enemy is my friend" and, trust me, there is no greater enemy to you > and me and free software than Micro$oft. > Sure, I am not an ideologue - closed packages are acceptable in userspace. Drivers are part of the kernel however so closed drivers are a violation of the GPL. (Nvidia is probably legal because they use the same binary blob as the windows drivers so it is not a derived work of the kernel). But if they developed the drivers for this system, the GPL requires them to release the source. In case it was not clear, my original reply only referred to the driver source, they are under no obligation to open source anything else. Lee
