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

Richard Stallman
2003-01-08T07:52:53Z

activistic political structure to bind a project like this, but
the successful execution of Linux as a large scale political,
social and economic product (credit to folks like Linus, Alan Cox,
Stephen Tweedie, etc...)

When you say "Linux" here, do you mean the kernel, or the whole
GNU/Linux system? With all due respect, I think you may not have
answered this question for yourself, because the people that you name
are people who worked on the kernel, but the success that you talk
about is the success of the whole system. (No kernel alone could have
had this effect.)

The practice of referring to the whole system by the same name as the
kernel alone leads to constant confusion between the two. You will
often see statements that "Linux is a Unix-like operating system, like
Solaris or FreeBSD, which is released under the GNU GPL." That is
false regardless of what meaning you assign to "Linux". The only way
to avoid confusion is to stop calling the whole system by the name
used for the kernel.

really paved the way for the entire open
source community as we understand it.

Our community is the free software community; it was built by the
idealism of the free software movement.

Like any community, it contains people with different views. Nowadays
many of the people in our community support the open source movement.
The open source advocates are legitimate members of the community, and
some have contributed to it. They have a right to form a movement to
promote their views, but that movement was started only in 1998, long
after the community existed. Their movement did not build the
community, and it should not be named after them.

Speaking of which, your ideas seem to have a lot in common with the
free software movement. I wonder if you thought that the open source
movement was the only one and that we all support it. (Many
inaccurate articles give that impression.) If you read about the free
software movement, you might decide we are closer to your views.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/, and in particular
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html for an
explanation of the difference between the two movements. We and they
have similar practices, which is why we and they can work together
some of the time, but what we say about it is very different from
what they say.