On Sun, 2007-28-10 at 17:58 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > 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 > those OS's. You're being disingenuous. In this case, a derivative work is not a casual term, but a concept defined by the second version of the GNU General Public License. > 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... The whole point is that the language of GPL2 is ambiguous enough that the status of Nvidia proprietary drivers is uncertain. Few lawyers with any subject matter expertise are going to recommend that a distribution ship the drivers when their status is uncertain, even if they are willing to. A court case might actually determine the status. However, regardless of the legal status, the drivers aren't released under a free license, so they aren't going to be released by any distribution concerned with software freedom. -- Bruce Byfield 604-421-7177 Burnaby, BC, Canada web: http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield blog: http://brucebyfield.wordpress.com/
