It's very imaginative to consider a device driver for a device
that
clearly works under other operating systems to be a derivative of one of
Fine - just load the windows version on your Linux box.. that should
be .. fun ...
those OS's. And the position would be a little more believable
if
accompanied by some court decisions that permitted interfaces needed for
normal operation to be copyrighted. But I don't think you really want
the latter...
Nothing to do with interfaces, only whether something is a derivative
work. Based on discussions with lawyers a lot of us think it is. Since
Nvidia still ship it I would assume their lawyer thinks it isnt.
In any case the result would just be that nvidia owners won't be
able to
run Linux. And the real question is, why do you want that - or even to
make it more difficult than necessary for those users?
A very strange argument. Applied to movies you'd argue we should all be
able to pirate them as charging makes it difficult for the users ?
There is a project to do open source 3D for Nvidia cards - look up
Nouveau. There is also one working on drivers for the newer ATI hardware,
although they at least now have the documentation.
For the future I'll leave you with this thought as to why I don't worry
about Nvidia.
- Everyone agrees graphics will get integrated onto the CPU die
- AMD/ATI have a fast x86 CPU
- Intel have a fast x86 CPU
- Nvidia don't
Alan