Re: [RFC] Small PCI core patch

Arjan van de Ven
2005-11-22T05:51:00Z

On Tue, 2005-11-22 at 10:35 +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 15:01 -0800, Greg KH wrote:
>
> > If you, or your company is relying on closed source kernel modules, your
> > days are numbered. And what are you going to do, and how are you going
> > to explain things to your bosses and your customers, if possibly,
> > something like this patch were to be accepted?
>
> I'm all about it, but good luck trying to convince ATI and/or nVidia ...

that doesn't mean they're allowed to not honor the GPL of course.

Also it's almost the same argument as the ndiswrapper discussion: as
long as there is an alternative some of these companies (prolly not
ati/nvidia although: see [1]) will stay closed, but once there's no
alternative they'll just open up.

I can see the point of the argument that a change like this needs to be
announced for say 6 months first in that feature-removal doc though.

[1] Both nvidia and ati have a way out: they can do the IP side
(translating 3D stuff into card specific commands) in userspace and just
pass the data to the hardware via a thin driver that just drives and
controls the hardware. Sure it may be 5% slower, but it's a lot cleaner
IP wise. X after all is MIT (bsd like without nasty clauses) licensed
and allows binary components.