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NVIDIA Engineers On The Realities Of Linux Drivers

Posted by timothy on from the not-at-this-time dept.

linuxquestions writes "LinuxQuestions.org recently interviewed members of the NVIDIA Linux team. The interview covers the internal use of Linux at NVIDIA, the current demand NVIDIA is seeing for Linux drivers, the biggest perceived obstacle in Linux becoming a mainstream gaming platform and the decision to maintain both an Open Source and closed source Linux driver."

1 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Unified Driver Infrastructure by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 2, Informative

    WHat? Third party stuff? I call bullshit. Nvidia just didnt want their stuff to be GPL'ed.. Source..(cannot find original MS article)

    http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020381,210103 7,00.htm

    (QUOTE) An OEM is required to sort through a potential legal morass of licensing issues around the GPL if it wants to protect its intellectual property rights. This creates extra costs from both a development and legal perspective. An example of this risk can be taken from nVidia. An nVidia programmer, in the course of developing a driver for one of its products, used a portion of code from a freely available video driver. The developer failed to realise the code was licensed under the GPL and would therefore require nVidia to release the source code for its entire driver. Because nVidia did not want to release the source code to its commercial software, the company incurred substantial costs to develop a new driver that did not contain the GPL code. (/QUOTE)

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