James Ogley wrote: >> I agree, this is their problem, not ours. They know exactly what they >> must do to solve this issue, there is nothing that we can do. > > Greg, are you calling on nVidia to GPL their driver code? If so, have > you contacted them directly and is there a formal way in which members > of the community can assist?
Back in 1998, NVidia forced the XFree86 developers to obfuscate their code and the situation has not improved till then. See the following post for the details: http://airlied.livejournal.com/2006/10/12/ Relicensing of the NVidia display driver code under the GPL is not going to happen (they may not own the code completely), but at least it would be nice if they didn't actively hinder development. Similar situation exists with ATI. Greg has repeatedly made clear that binary only kernel modules are a license violation. ATI/NVidia can't/don't want to open the sources of their drivers. So the only thing we can hope for is that the unavailability of binary only kernel modules will be painful enough to get more developers involved with the reverse engineered open source drivers. How can the community assist? * Test the open source graphics drivers and report bugs * Write HOWTOs for these drivers * Encourage/nudge NVidia/ATI to make specifications available to developers (optionally under NDA with source code release agreement) * (Developers only:) Help reverse engineering closed source drivers Most reverse engineering/driver development projects have only 2-5 developers although literally millions of people benefit from their work. For example, the NVidia nforce network driver (forcedeth) was created by three people (two for reverse engineering, one for writing the new driver) and I (as part of that team) would sometimes have killed to get feedback from more users. For the sake of such teams, get involved and help them as good as you can. Regards, Carl-Daniel --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
