Hi, Ok, I must confess I neither have XFree86's code at hand nor am I a programmer, therefore my information is only second-hand, yet I allowed myself to make this commentary on the authority of the posts of the following thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg03961.html Mike A. Harrison still does not sound satisfied by the explanation of nv's maintainer: "While it is true this is an open source driver in a sense, in practice, it really isn't very open source, because the driver source is heavily obfuscated. It uses hexadecimal I/O addresses and values rather than symbolic register names and values, thus making it next to impossible for anyone outside of Nvidia to make meaningful modifications to the driver." (found on https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=127823) Some comments on the first thread, by the way, hint that nv is not the only driver to adopt such an unreadable "coding style". Mike Harrison concludes saying "as none of those drivers is ever likely to have any major work done on them in the future other than by their respective existing driver maintainers. Let's hope and pray that none of the existing maintainers gets hit by a bus, or we're screwed. ;o)" Really all this is getting as far as it gets from the spirit, if not the letter, of free software... Camille d'Alm�ras --- Florian Weimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > * Ben Johnson: > The > > code for nv is voluntarily obfuscated, [...] > > Which files are obfuscated? > __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Take Yahoo! Mail with you! Get it on your mobile phone. http://mobile.yahoo.com/maildemo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
