Re: The future of "nv" driver (was: Linux compatible mainboards -another thought)
On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:16:32 -0500
"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <bss@iguanasuicide.net> wrote:
> On Monday 26 April 2010 15:09:57 Celejar wrote:
...
> > What makes the non-free firmware question particularly interesting is
> > that the alternative is often to hardcode the functionality into the
> > hardware. Now, if you had a board with completely closed HW, but that
> > presented an open, well documented interface for the driver, most
> > people would be very happy (although there are, of course, the open
> > hardware crusaders - more power to them!). So, now that they've simply
> > implemented some of that functionality in SW, in the form of firmware
> > which the driver installs on the card, but which has nothing to do with
> > your host machine, are you really any worse off?
>
> As a distributor you may very well be. If you can't provide the source code,
> you can't satisfy the terms of the GPL (usually).
? We're talking about firmware for things like wireless cards, produced
by the HW manufacturers, e.g., Broadcom. Where does the GPL enter into
this?
Celejar
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