Arnt Karlsen wrote:
..we do have the right to distribute the GPL ati and radeon drivers
under the GPL.
Yeah, but they suck in comparison with the binary drivers. There's no 3D
acceleration.
This is a very strong reason Nvidea would consider
honoring our question to distribute their proprietary binary drivers
favorably, or watch ATI get all the FGLive business on GPL drivers.
..we need only ask them, and then ATI, and in that sequence. ;o)
I don't think the problem was ever with Nvidia or ATI. Specifically
asking their permission might be polite but other people package those
binary drivers in convenient ways (like in RPMs) and don't run into trouble.
The trouble is that some random troller emailed Kororaa (who also do a
LiveCD thing) claiming that GPL prohibits distributing proprietary
binary drivers with a linux kernel. Opinions are (to say the least)
divided. Kororaa has, temporarily, withdrawn their LiveCD.
The scare is that FGLive would run into the same problem with the GPL.
Reading slashdot, you get the impression that the "you can't distribute"
camp are arguing from a purely idealistic point of view in which they
claim that all software should be free and that free software cannot
co-exist with proprietary software on the same planet.
The other camp is actually reading the words of the GPL which don't seem
to prohibit anything being proprietary, just that it can't be *linked
in* to GPL software. Drivers aren't linked in, they're dynamically
loaded when needed, and in the case of the 3D drivers, the shim that
interfaces to the kernel calls to let that happen *is* GPL and
sourcecode is distributed for it.
Seems like a no-brainer to me, but IANAL.
Steve.
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