[FWD] My mail to Nvidia regarding their driver license
Hello,
just sended the following letter to info@nvidia.com with Subject
"License of Linux driver". I found this address at their web site
and hope it will reach a responsible person. May be others write
similiar letters to let them think over the problem.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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Hello,
the license of your XFree4.0 driver prohibits distribution by Debian
GNU/Linux. To quote from your site
http://www.nvidia.com/Products/Drivers.nsf/Linux.html
Files for download and the FAQ
The files below require a fair amount of steps to get them fully
installed. You should refer to the updated Build (0.9-5)FAQ for
full installation instructions, as well as help with getting some
common apps up and running. You can download the files via HTTP or
FTP.
Files via HTTP
In order to run these new drivers, you need one pair of files,
below. Download the appropriate pair of files and read the FAQ for
how to get them installed. NOTE: By downloading these files, you
agree to the license agreement above.
You could easily help unexperienced users out of this trouble, if the
driver could be shipped with distributions like Debian GNU/Linux and
all the FAQ stuff could be implemented just into a Debian package of
the driver which would reduce the effort of installation to a plain
apt-get install <nvidia-driver-package>
and updates to the latest version could be done using the normal
Debian update mechanism
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
to get the complete system up to date.
I can not spend the effort to maintain each single machine in our
production system by hand and so I have to decide for another graphics
hardware. That´s a pity because in general I consider to be Nvidia
products as good hardware but the time consuming maintainance is
inacceptable for me.
I would like to see it if you could overwork your license in this way
that the driver could be shipped with Debian. Because I´m not a legal
expert you could possibly contact debian-legal@debian.org.
Kind regards
Andreas Tille.
Debian developer
tille@debian.org
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