Chris Wilkinson wrote: <snip>
The authors of free software AGREE and WANT to allow people to view their source...nVidia have lucrative IP technologies at risk...protecting that from prying eyes is only protecting their core business. Without that we'd have no decent cards...
Hiding their driver software does *not* necessarily protect their "intellectual property" neither the reverse that exposing the source of their driver software mean that their "IP" has been given away.
All because a hardware manufacturer has made a business decision to hide their driver software does not make it axiomatic that they *need* to.
Having said that â in a fairly argumentative way, sorry â the astute would note that I have an nVidia card in my box :)
Yes, and do you run the proprietary drivers? Without those your 3D card is limited to only 2D...if thats all you need then thats fine, even thought the 'nv' module is dreadfully slow in 2D...
But as Mike JS has pointed to on the GNU site there is a *moral/ethical* argument here. They make an argument that it is fundamentally wrong on a *moral* level to hide source code and restrict freedom of software.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a "religious" debate. But maybe we should look at whether there are issues here that *do* need to be looked at at that level.
<ethical philosophy lecture>
Open Source advocates say that the argument is about the quality of the resultant code. (a consequentialist or utilitarian view)
The Free Software Foundation say that it is morally wrong to buy, write or sell proprietary software. (a deontological or Kantian approach)
</ethical philosophy lecture>
