On 22 Jan 2001, Vox wrote:
>
> During the bombing raid on Sun, 21 Jan 2001 17:21:26 -0600, Ed Wilts was heard
> mumbling in fear::
>
>
> > "Due to certain legal liabilities and for the protection of intellectual
> > property, Matrox reserves licensing rights to the library and prohibits
> > reverse engineering but allows free distribution under any operating system.
> > Matrox encourages members of the open source community to freely distribute
> > and assist in the further development of this driver."
"prohibits reverse engineering". Uh, what about countries where that
restriction is illegal? :-)
> And they think that somebody in the open source/free software community
> is actually going to help them improve a driver under this conditions? ha! fat
> chance!
Indeed. Giving some closed source binaries to the community is almost
worse than giving nothing at all: OK, it allows those of us unlucky enough
to have their proprietary cruft to use said cruft until we can get a
replacement, but...
> > Even though the driver they ship is definitely not GPL, neither is Netscape
> > and Mandrake has no problems shipping it.
>
> I happen to *strongly* agree with mandrake in their position about
> closed source drivers, even if it means I have to go grab the nvidia drivers
> from the nvidia site to get my card going properly. Then again, I don't depend
> on X to be able to go grab stuff off the net, since I can do it from console
> with no prob at all.
>
> On the other hand, when they say that they prohibit reverse engineering
> they are not only going against your freedom (according to the FSF/GNU
> definition) but against the law in most (if not all) countries. So....f them.
Indeed. Reverse engineer away, after checking your local legislation :-)
James.
