Re: GPL and Nvidia

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 01:26:24PM -0800, Andre Hedrick wrote:
> AH!  A man of reason here!
> It would be nice if "LI" got in the business of issuing license
> subscriptions for binary only modules.  Where the binary vendor must
> register and pay a royality fee.  This fee would be used to support "LI"
> and defend Linux in a court case if needed.
> I personally would gladly pay a reasonable (usual and customary) fee for
> the service and right to sell binary models with out having to pay a
> lawyer to write a "position" and be prepared to sue every snot nose brat
> in the world.
> Otherwise, one has to deal with unreasonable people.
> There are people who do not work for distros or have found that other
> companies want to control their contributions to GPL, but need a means to
> support themselves with there other works related to emerging
> technologies.
> Obviously I am being way to sensible about the issue, and should go use
> NetBSD instead and give them the license money.

I don't give two hoots about the money or the open/closed stuff in the
context of "Is it the right thing to do?" or "What should nvidia do?"
nvidia's drivers have developed a bad reputation, at least in my mind,
and I don't want their bugreports (even though RH was hurt worst here),
and I don't want my betatesters adding that unknown into the equation.

Supposedly they've improved lately, not that I care. One only need be
bitten once.

Maybe having no way to prove a bug's fixed is a downside of binary modules.


Bill