2006/9/7, Andreas Jaeger
My *personal* opinion on these drivers is explained here:
There is something i have read here a lot, people looks very concern what are the kernel developers opinion about including or not, non-free modules in the kernel, i don't really understand why that's important, from my point of view their opinion is just irrelevant what really cares is what GPL says and from that's point of view the opinion from a lawyer or a judge is much more relevant, people can't just go and ask every single developer what the GPL means to him, that's the main reason to have a unify licence in first place ( and I'm not saying my point of view is the right one ). The developers point of view, make people don't see the complete scenario some time ( or maybe is me, i don't know ), for example when i read kororaa argument about "Kororaa Accused of Violating GPL " http://kororaa.org/index.php?entry=entry060512-160752 You can see that they said that nvidia drivers have a GPL open source "shim" and a binary part, the "shim" is the part that is linked to the kernel, not the binary part, so they don't brake the GPL. ... but the "shim" is GPL too !! and from my point of view, is just doesn't matter if nvidia is ok or not to link this "shim" with a binary, they just can't because is GPL, he's binary is braking the GPL from their owns "shim". So from those point of view, i don't really care what kernel developers have to says about it, they are developers, not lawyers. -- Marcel Mourguiart