Opinion: NVIDIA drivers are a Good Thing [tm]

[Rui Miguel Seabra]

On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 18:45 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> Both ATI and nVidia own enough patents (IP weapons of mass destruction, so to
> speak) in 3d rendering acceleration to assure complete annihilation of anyone provably
> violating those. 
(...)
> Unless open source developers are granted special protection from persecution
> of IP violation, the open source development is increasingly either shackled, or
> forced into gray zones, or outright illegality</ianal>.

The solution to patents is not special protection of Free Software or
Open Source.

Proprietary software companies suffer a lot.

One of the most sucessfull proprietary software portuguese companies has
one guy hired full-time in the USA just to research potential patent
liabilities:  if they are sued, they will have to close.

The solution is no software patents at all.
Software patents are a breach of the TRIPs agreement.

> Still, better binary-only (buggy, breaking at each kernel upgrade) 
> accelerated drivers instead no accelerated drivers at all.

Breaking kernel support as well... since a large part of Linux
developers will not help you and point you to NVIDIA since they
can do very little to help you.

Rui
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20040517/62680d41/attachment-0001.sig>