Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 1st Feb 2007 14:41 UTC, submitted by Oliver
"Linux has a large amount of device drivers for hardware not supported on FreeBSD, especially USB devices. Not rarely, such drivers have been written based on information derived by protocol sniffing, reverse engineering and the like. This makes the code highly undocumented, and renders the porting effort extremely error prone. To help with this task, I decided to start working on an emulation layer that would let us recompile the linux source code on FreeBSD, and provide a sufficiently complete emulation of the kernel APIs so that device drivers (or at least certain classes) could be used without modifications to their source code."
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Member since:
2005-07-13
According to butters, the license of the kernel module doesn't matter, as long as you don't distribute the linked binary. And that's exactly what NVidia is doing: they're not distributing linked binary kernel modules.
Actually, they are. nVidia does make binary modules compiled against specific versions of Suse distribution kernels available for download, for instance.
Their legal department seems comfortable with the fact that their binary blob is not derivative of the kernel, since it is OS-agnostic and the exact same blob is used on Windows and *nix. I suspect their legal department is correct.