Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 9th Nov 2012 22:11 UTC
Thread beginning with comment 541707
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Nvidia could also stop being morons and they could contribute to nouveau instead.
Or you could stop being ignorant and jump down from the high horse. We do not know the details of the contracts and obligations NVIDIA operates under and how many NDAs they themselves are bound by, but there definitely are atleast a handful of those and therefore it would be downright illegal for NVIDIA to do that. At most they could hire some independent developer to work on Nouveau, someone who has no access to NVIDIA's internal docs, but how much would that benefit anyone?
"Protecting the integrity" by allowing some closed blobs to use dma-buf but not nvidia? Yes, all the SoC drivers that use dma-buf are closed. Sure they have a GPL component in the kernel, which is how they're allowed to use dma-buf, but that component won't do you much without the userspace blobs.
So there's no "protecting integrity" or "making a moral stance" or anything by keeping Nvidia out. It's that some vendors have managed to isolate just enough of their driver into a GPL component, while Nvidia can't because of how their driver is put together.
Also, the first two versions of dma-buf did not have those symbols exported as gpl-only: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2012-October/029107...
apparently are too stubborn on the licensing issues
You do know the thing that is called copyright, don't you? Try to get an agreement from all semi-popular GPL licensed project contributors and you might understand the issue...
nVidia can be a good FOSS citizen and move more stuff into the userland libraries.





Member since:
2009-03-13
Actually they did make an effort but the kernel devs apparently are too stubborn on the licensing issues so I guess there are huge limits on what the NVIDIA drivers can do. I am referring to the case of the devs refusing to relicense the DMA-BUF APIs - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIwNDI
Eh ... it is such a pity. The best GPU will not work properly because of such stubborness. Don't get me wrong, they have full right to refuse to relicense this API, but it is such a bummer!