On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 12:55:50PM +0000, Francis Giannaros wrote:
> To address a point made earlier:
>
> Greg KH wrote:
> > Both of these are third party packages, Ubuntu was forced to stop
> > shipping their pre-built packages a while ago for the obvious legal
> > reasons.
>
> That's not true at all (see http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/x11/nvidia-glx ).
> That is the package for the Edgy release, which was released just over a week
> ago. It's in the "Restricted" repository, officially supported and released
> by Ubuntu. These packs have never been stopped; always been there.
That's not the kernel driver, only the Xorg drivers, as per the list of
the files contained in this package:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search_contents.pl?searchmode=filelist&word=nvidia-glx&version=edgy&arch=i386
so I don't have a problem with them being distributed.
From what I remember, Ubuntu gets around this whole issue by
downloading the files from somewhere and then having the user (through
an automatic script) build the kernel driver and do the linking on their
own. That way they don't violate the GPL, and push the violation onto
the user (if the user happens to redistribute the binary).
So no, Ubuntu does not ship the pre-built kernel driver, unless you can
find it somewhere else on their site.
> In fact, their future intentionson getting these included by default are even
> stronger. See a spec for Feisty (the next version of Ubuntu) drafted by the
> Shuttleworth himself:
> https://features.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/accelerated-x
Yes, I've been talking with the Ubuntu developers about this. And they
too are working to get opensource drivers for these devices. See the
magic wording on that page:
For those vendors which have proprietary drivers that enable
acceleration, we will consider enabling those drivers by default
if they can provide us with an SLA for security and related
updates.
That does much of what Novell currently does with Nvidia. Novell pushes
all of the burden of support, distribution, and legal issues onto
Nvidia.
So again, Ubuntu is moving toward the same situation that Novell
currently has. And that's fine with me.
thanks,
greg k-h
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
