Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
Hi,
Ok, I must confess I neither have XFree86's code at
hand nor am I a programmer, therefore my information
is only second-hand, yet I allowed myself to make this
commentary on the authority of the posts of the
following thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg03961.html
Mike A. Harrison still does not sound satisfied by the
explanation of nv's maintainer:
"While it is true this is an open source driver in a
sense, in practice, it really isn't very open source,
because the driver source is heavily obfuscated. It
uses hexadecimal I/O addresses and values rather than
symbolic register names and values, thus making it
next to impossible for anyone outside of Nvidia to
make meaningful modifications to the driver."
(found on
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=127823)
Some comments on the first thread, by the way, hint
that nv is not the only driver to adopt such an
unreadable "coding style". Mike Harrison concludes
saying
"as none of those drivers is ever likely to have any
major work done on them in the future other than by
their respective existing driver maintainers. Let's
hope and pray that none of the existing maintainers
gets hit by a bus, or we're screwed. ;o)"
Really all this is getting as far as it gets from the
spirit, if not the letter, of free software...
Camille d'Alméras
--- Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
> * Ben Johnson:
> The
> > code for nv is voluntarily obfuscated, [...]
>
> Which files are obfuscated?
>
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