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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 20 2012 @ 09:44 AM EDT |
Well, Microsoft does have pretty strong influence on NVIDIA for various reasons
(including investments and complex contracts that restricts what NVIDIA can do
as a company). I wouldn't be surprised if NVIDIA might be much more tangled than
with Microsoft than we believe.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 20 2012 @ 09:52 AM EDT |
"I am pretty sure that Microsoft would be aware of legal implications and
be very careful to ensure that anything they did remained "above
board"..."
History would disagree with you. They've ignored the law often enough for us to
think they have an unofficial budget for paying legal fines.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 20 2012 @ 07:38 PM EDT |
| Thanks Sproggit, I'd hoped someone would put it that way. Everyone wants free
software. Few are willing to pay for it. Seems we go through this same argument
every few years, starting about ten years back when Mr. Torvalds made explicitly
clear the singular reason he allowed proprietary binary drivers to be linked
with the kernel via glue code was so that Linux would have usable and performing
drivers from Nvidia and ATi. Without those there would be no commercial CAD or
Wall Street (amongst others) interest in using and supporting Linux. With these
proprietary video drivers Linux has arrived where it is today.
It ain't
perfect. Ain't everyone satisfied. It is where it is.
Nvidia has performed
to the letter and spirit of Mr. Torvald's deal. They argue that by so doing they
provide more robust drivers, and better Linux support , than their
competition. Take that as one may.
Me, I continue to take my business to
ATi/AMD. Speaking of which, Michael has another timely article over at
Phoronix.
Ed L (not logged in)
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 21 2012 @ 07:50 AM EDT |
<< First: nVidia are a commercial, for-profit company. If
anyone in the Linux community believes that nVidia doesn't
participate sufficiently [i.e. by open-sourcing their
drivers] then broadly 2 choices exist... 1. Don't buy nVidia
GPUs; 2. Become more active and vocal in attempting to
positively encourage nVidia to see the light.>>
The issues around this are very complicated. For example:
generally copyright is granted without a obligation to
publish the source code. That is just simply wrong. If an
entity (commercial or whatever) wants to obtain copyright
then by law they should be forced to publish their code.
There are many reasons for this, amongst many others: pear-
review to ensure that they do not violate any rights of
others in their code, for which they want to have strong
legal copyright. This must be seen analogous to patent law,
which is far more stringent in the application process to
ensure rights of others are respected.
Furthermore, there is obviously something smelling fishy
around this issue and I doubt that by character
anykind of light will want to be seen.
<< Third: there is a point of commonality to all of these
issues: Microsoft Windows.>>
Exactly. And don't we all know how they have been doing
business from the very beginning. There have been and likely
still are huge issues around competetive practices.
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