On Sun, November 21, 2004 1:43 pm, Mike Hearn said:
I think you need to talk to the nVidia engineers and/or Alan Cox, who has
said in the past (I think) that he can't find a way for them to open their
driver sources without suffering serious consequences. It's not a simple
matter of patents and legal problems. It's a matter of economics.
Anyway, this whole point is silly: nobody should be *forced* against their
wishes to open source their code if they don't want to. If open source
development really is better than the old way, then rational people will
become a part of it over time if they can.
Similarly no open source developer should be *forced* to deal with issues
created by binary only components.
The last thing we want is some developers saying "I didn't
want to GPL my
code, but I was forced to". That achieves nothing in the long run. Next
time they write software that doesn't have to be GPLd they won't do it,
because nobody made the argument to them for the free software philosophy
and won.
In fact the most likely thing is not that they'll GPL their sources
against their wishes, more likely they'll just hack around it or not
bother.
Either way, Linux will continue under the stewardship of those who
understand and respect the fundamental difference between it and
closed-source alternatives.
Sean