> 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
