Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
Hi,
First, thank you all very much for your time and
valuable insight. I foresaw the issue would be
controversical, but if debian-legal is not *the* place
where it should be debated, where else could it be ?
As I did start this thread very in earnest, let me
clarify my intent to avoid further name-calling
(pretty please). 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.
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.
Now, I am getting carried away. If it appears then
that nv is "only" unmaintainable, you convinced me
that the game is over as far as the concerns of
debian-legal go. My loss that Debian was not as clear
in its social contract or in the DFSG as the GPL is.
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
was baffled to learn nv is neither proprietary, nor
free as defined by the FSF, to reach a common ground.
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),
and I am still living. GNU did it the other, hard way
round by writing a system from scratch, and they are
faring pretty well these days.
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
!
Cheers,
Camille d'Alméras
--- Daniel Stone <daniel@fooishbar.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 12:02:50PM -0800, Ben
> Johnson wrote:
> > I would like to hear your comments on the matter
> > before I submit a bug report asking for the
> removal
> > from base of the nv X driver and possibly also of
> the
> > rivafb kernel module for severe policy violation.
> The
> > code for nv is voluntarily obfuscated, in effect
> > making it proprietary: its sole maintainer is an
> > NVidia employee, because only him has access to
> the
> > readable source and to the specifications of the
> > cards. This post gives a good overview of the
> problem
> > at hand:
>
> As much as the current situation sucks (I avoid
> nVidia cards for
> precisely this reason, personally), this is the
> stupidest thing I've
> ever heard. If you want to ditch it because of
> this, I also recommend
> chasing the 'nv' driver out of XFree86/X.Org on the
> same principle, even
> though it's not GPL. After all, no-one but Andy
> Ritger, Mark
> Vojkovitch and Thomas Zander can touch it.
>
> This is utter suicide, and I can only hope that this
> mail wasn't
> serious.
>
> Daniel, with memories of the 'omg vorbis is non-free
> because itz not
> pcm' (or whatever it was) flamewar
>
> ATTACHMENT part 2 application/pgp-signature
name=signature.asc
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