On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 18:45 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: > 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. (...) > 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>. The solution to patents is not special protection of Free Software or Open Source. Proprietary software companies suffer a lot. One of the most sucessfull proprietary software portuguese companies has one guy hired full-time in the USA just to research potential patent liabilities: if they are sued, they will have to close. The solution is no software patents at all. Software patents are a breach of the TRIPs agreement. > Still, better binary-only (buggy, breaking at each kernel upgrade) > accelerated drivers instead no accelerated drivers at all. Breaking kernel support as well... since a large part of Linux developers will not help you and point you to NVIDIA since they can do very little to help you. Rui
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