Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Bernd Petrovitsch
2005-12-06T23:26:18Z

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 15:29 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
[...]
> Indeed, anything newer than a G550 is binary only as far as 3D is concerned.
> Sad, as Matrox used to be a really good recommendation for an
> opensource friendly graphic card vendor.
>
> It's not as if their newer cards are even that fast, so my only
> guess is that they've gone the binary blob route purely for
> paranoia reasons.

Yes, the "software as such patent" and/or "trivial patent" disease
spreaded the last decades - not only in USPTO-land (and identically in
JPO-land) but also basically illegally in EPO-land.
And it is probably much simpler to "prove" (in the law sense, not
technically/mathematically) a patent infringement if you have C source
of the driver instead of some undocumented blob of object code.

Bernd
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