On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 05:27:57PM +0100, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote: > If you're ready to accept a bad solution you'll hardly ever get the good > one, and in this case never since it is near to impossible (for > technical reasons) to have good and/or complete Free Software drivers > for NVIDIA cards at the moment. Both ATI and nVidia own enough patents (IP weapons of mass destruction, so to speak) in 3d rendering acceleration to assure complete annihilation of anyone provably violating those. This mutually assured destruction stalemate very effectively prevents any of the parties volunteering with opensourcing their drivers, and in fact allows any open source drivers infringing on above IP (clean-room reverse engineered, or not: try to prove a negative to anyone with deeper pockets than you, in court) to be destroyed by litigation. Unless open source developers are granted special protection from persecution of IP violation, the open source development is increasingly either shackled, or forced into gray zones, or outright illegality</ianal>. Still, better binary-only (buggy, breaking at each kernel upgrade) accelerated drivers instead no accelerated drivers at all. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net
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