nvidia

[Les Mikesell]

Timothy Murphy wrote:

>> If I give away copies of someone elses movies and permit redistribution
>> then thats still piracy. The question is one of derived works and what
>> the derived work boundary is.
> 
> I think Alan Cox - 
> whom I greatly admire for his many contributions to Linux -
> is being disingenuous in concentrating on the legal aspects 
> of nVidia drivers.
> 
> Some obscure legal issue may arise,
> but the fact of the matter is nVidia's closed drivers
> would not be acceptable to Fedora with or without legalities.
> 
> In my (limited) experience closed drivers create serious problems,
> as you never know if they will work with newer kernels
> or other software, so you cannot rely on them too much.

In my experience, open source drivers have as many or more problems than 
the closed source versions.  _If_ you are Alan Cox or some number of 
hackers with equivalently specialized skills that you could probably 
count on one hand, having the source code available might be of some 
value when the supplied binary doesn't work.  The rest of us report the 
bug and wait, and again in my experience over the last couple of 
decades, the closed source providers are at least equally responsive in 
this scenario.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com