Re: Why is Nvidia given GPL'd code to use in closed source drivers?

Henning P. Schmiedehausen
2003-01-05T18:30:36Z

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>to contribute to free software. We are fortunate that Netscape, Sun,
>and IBM, and the people who won their partial cooperation, did not
>take your advice.

Funny you mention IBM here. I was always under the impression, that
the IBM Open Source effort is mainly there to sell more boxes (which
are well supported by the "good guys' operating system" because they
offer and support open source GPL drivers.

And then run their applications on it, which are not, I repeat, _NOT_
open sourced or free.

So they give away a few drivers which doesn't earn any money anyway,
get lots of good publicity and community support for free and also put
a foot in the back of a company which they don't like but have to
license/support their OS anyway (Microsoft).

To my (and obviously to the clued people inside IBM) this sounds
win-win.

You can do this if you're IBM.

Any before you ask why I wrote this: To me, by calling IBM "the good
guys", you're activly promoting their non-free, close-sourced
applications running on top of Linux (and their hardware).

"Stallman called IBM the good guys. Buy their Websphere application
suite running on Linux on eSeries Hardware. Film at 11".

They're not an open source company. Neither are Sun (which also sells
Hardware and applications; ironically their iPlanet stuff comes from
Netscape) or Netscape (their Applications are now called "iPlanet" and
come from Sun =:-) and with open sourcing their browser they didn't
give away anything; they already lost the browser wars to Microsoft
and noone could read their code anyway).

But all three sucked you into saying "IBM, Sun and Netscape
contributed to free software". But you don't understand their
motive. Which is money. And the stuff that earns the money wasn't open
sourced at all.

Regards
Henning

--
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