Submitted by “Gray and Bergamini recently worked together to develop the nfe driver to support NVIDIA ethernet controllers. In this interview, they talk about OpenBSD’s policy to not ship binary-blobs, explaining the problems associated with drivers that use these blobs and the affect these types of drivers have on the open source community. They also detail the efforts involved in writing the nfe driver, describing why they started the project, how they were able to support undocumented hardware, and the features supported by the new driver.”
And in related news, Go Daddy has donated $10,000 to support OpenSSH development.
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060420063121
Haven’t these guys done the same sort of “reverse engineering” that set the ReactOS project back and resulted in a huge audit? The same people who analyzed the GPL code wrote the BSD code. I wouldn’t expect the original forcedeth developers to complain, but if nVidia suddently decides they don’t like OpenBSD, they could claim nfe is a derivative of the GPL code they’ve contributed to forcedeth. I’m not trying to troll. This is an honest concern.
They could, but this would be easy to handle. At worst, they would have to change the code, so it wasn’t a derivative; at best it would be clear that the implementation does not contain GPL’ed code.
Damien Bergamini explains in this interview that they only get the hardware specifications but they didn’t use same algorhytms or such things; so this should be legal.
Also, AFAIK the OpenBSD project isn’t settled in the USA, so they don’t have to watch for a company suing this project, because in most non-US countries reverse-engineering is AFAIK legal.
Since I depend entirely on my nForce2 working to get online, do net stuff, get system downloads and updates, is it working ok with Open? What’s going on about it all?
Jake, nVidia has contributed to the source for forcedeth? I had no idea! Although if Microsoft can submit a patch to GAIM for using MSN protocol, why can’t nVidia do a bit to support a bit of free(as for in open) stuff.
Jake, nVidia has contributed to the source for forcedeth? I had no idea! Although if Microsoft can submit a patch to GAIM for using MSN protocol, why can’t nVidia do a bit to support a bit of free(as for in open) stuff.
From the interview:
Jonathan Gray:
…
A few years ago several people started a reverse engineered driver for Linux, which for some bizarre reason I don’t understand NVIDIA employees seem to now contribute to and recommend over their own driver.
I didn’t read the interview, well I guess that’s what I get for it.
But regardless, all hail OpenBSD security! I know even Linux distros and Mac OS X have shipped with OpenSSH included!
>I know even Linux distros and Mac OS X have shipped with OpenSSH included!
Because that is the only option. Or actually there is one other option. That is to buy a commercial implementation from SSH Communications Security Oyj. There aren’t any other implementations, not even free (as in beer) alternatives.
But there are other SSH servers and clients out there. Off the top of my head, I can think of DropBear at http://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html and I know I’ve seen others.
You are both woefully ignorant and terribly foolish for not correcting this problem. Lsh is the GNU project’s SSH implementation and the Wikipedia lists many SSH clients. Putty even works on Linux.
An interesting article but…
does nobody the proof read stuff there days?
…
aparintly they do’nt,
“Haven’t these guys done the same sort of “reverse engineering” that set the ReactOS project back and resulted in a huge audit?”
No.
“but if nVidia suddently decides they don’t like OpenBSD, they could claim nfe is a derivative of the GPL code they’ve contributed to forcedeth.”
Anyone can claim pretty much anything they want but its only interesting if the claim has any basis in reality.
In this case, there is no derivative *code* so such a claim would have no merit.