Vendor only distributable packages - was " Kernel 2059 from Dave Jones fixes nvidia.ko loading"

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 17:55 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 09:23 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 16:37 -0600, John Morris wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 09:03, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > > 
> > > > in some jurisdictions there is a legal precedent for linking to
> > > > "illegal" content to be just as bad as distributing it. Now I'm not
> > > > saying that the flash plugin is illegal (it's not afaik) but the
> > > > parallel is enough to scare many lawyers ;)
> > > 
> > > I really doubt there could be legal implications to pointing to an ftp
> > > site.  Even if they prefer people go to the webpage there has been
> > > enough cases now about linking to pretty much settle that issue.
> > > 
> > > But has anyone at RH tried asking for permission?  Including preset repo
> > > lines for livna is right out, both legally and morally for the mission
> > > of Fedora.  But what about the idea of a legal but non-free catagory for
> > > Flash, Acrobat, Nvidia, ATI, etc? 
> > 
> > what makes you think NVidia and ATI are legal?
> > 
> Since the vendor(s) makes them available for free download I would guess
> there is no question of legality here.
> 

so if I put up a copy of The Matrix DVD for free download there is no
question of legality either?
(hint: not all the code that created the nvidia .ko file is owned by
NVidia, some of it comes from the kernel. Same and even more so for ATI)