On Friday 03 November 2006 16:29, Greg KH wrote:
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.
I see. What of http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/misc/nvidia-kernel-source ?
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).
Perhaps I should speak to people since it seems my memory is playing up on me, but I can't remember doing anything but running sed on xorg.conf s/nv/nvidia/. Looking at the guide now I see it tells you to run nvidia-glx-config enable -- would it really be contained in there? If so, that's a remarkably tidy way of getting around such a thing, and I can't imagine why other distributions wouldn't adopt it too (like SUSE).
So again, Ubuntu is moving toward the same situation that Novell currently has. And that's fine with me.
I see; will be interesting to see how this turns out. Regards, Francis.