On Sat, Feb 26, 2005 at 03:10:47AM -0800, Ben Johnson wrote: > I am trying to make sure Debian's > stance on software freedom is compatible with that of > the FSF and with mine, and if not, try and reconcile > them. The FSF has an issue with X as a whole, as the sample implementation (aka XFree86/Xorg) is licensed under a mix of MIT/X11 and three-clause BSD licences, both of which are open source rather than free software licences. > Let us consider this: after all, maybe nv is not > voluntarily rendered illegible, maybe I was plainly > wrong saying so. The outcome of the investigations of > the other posters will ascertain this. Obviously, what > still strikes me is that, as points out Justin Pryzby, > to prefer this coding style Mark Vojkovitch would have > had to program the registers and the functions "off > the top of his head", which if there are many does not > exactly sound the preferred means of writing source > code. Correct me if I am mistaken. I honestly don't believe anyone can possibly prefer to look them up that way. MarkV himself has made references to 'looking [the magic numbers] up in the book'. > Now, I am getting carried away. If it appears then > that nv is "only" unmaintainable, It's absolutely unmaintainable, but I don't think anything could (or should) be made of the claim that it's not open source or whatever. FWIW, I believe GPU microcode is in the same book: show me someone outside ATI who can program a modern-day GPU. > Now, not everybody installing Debian on their belief > it is the distro most committed to software freedom is > aware of the legal finesses that allow nv in main. I do not believe there are any 'legal finesses' involved. The licence is clear-cut, and I don't see anything in the code to the contrary. > I > was baffled to learn nv is neither proprietary, nor > free as defined by the FSF, to reach a common ground. None of X is free as defined by the FSF. It is open source as defined by the OSI, and free as defined by the DFSG, but the FSF would not call MIT/X11 or three-clause BSD free software. > What did I do then as a paranoid freak ? I kicked it > out, replaced it with vesa (which still relies on > Nvidia's bios before you mention it, but at least to > my understanding through a peer-reviewed interface), Not really. VBE is a standard, and it is accepted that you have a common set of registers to poke, but the BIOS is still entirely closed. > To sum it up, even if it can be demonstrated by sheer > legalese that nv deserves to be in main, I still lift > my voice to show my disaproval. May the naives like me > encounter this thread on their favourite search engine > ! If you want a fully free software experience, may I suggest a video card from one of the few vendors these days who distribute specifications to open source developers?
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