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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."

2 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Unified Driver Infrastructure by Gogo+Dodo · · Score: 2, Insightful
    You didn't read the article carefully. The nVidia programmer added GPL code to the driver, however doing so triggered the GPL clause where the entire driver needed to be released. Since third party licensed code is included in the driver that could not be released, the GPL code had to be removed.

    The only people that can truly comment on why the nVidia driver can or can not be released are internal to nVidia. So you have to take whatever nVidia says at face value. If they say there is licensed code in their drivers that they can't release, then you have to accept that, as you are in no position to say "Bullshit! There is no licensed code." You don't have access to the source, so you wouldn't know.

  2. Re:Unified Driver Infrastructure by Smallpond · · Score: 2, Insightful

    From the nVidia license agreement:

    "All title and copyrights in and to the SOFTWARE ... are owned by NVIDIA, or its suppliers."

    This might be standard legalese, but it certanly states that code isn't necessarily all nVidia's.

    By the way, "yum update" is not a good idea on Fedora Core 2 if you have the nVidia driver installed.