Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 07:44:34 -0600 From: Joe Warner <rootman22@comcast.net> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Nvidia Licensing Question Message-ID: <200307200744.34734.rootman22@comcast.net>
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Hi, I was talking to someone recently about why there isn't support for Nvidia's Nforce drivers under FreeBSD yet. He said: "This might have something to do with the fact that the NIC driver is not GPL licensed. See the "License" section of the nForce Linux readme: http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86_40/nforce/1.0-0248/readme_nforce-1.0-0248.txt As I remember, FreeBSD only includes software that come under the GPL or BSD license" I responded saying I didn't think it had anything to do with licensing or the Nvidia graphics driver wouldn't be supported either. He responded: "Umm, read the link I provided carefully. The graphics driver is GPL. FreeBSD will include GPLed software without issue. It is only the NIC driver that is NOT GPL. Thus, FreeBSD will not include the NIC driver that NVidia provides, but will include the graphics driver." He says the NIC driver is not covered under the GPL. It that's true then how can they make it available for Linux? ..and: "I suspect that the reason in this case is pure licensing. Read the license section of the readme above. It could likely be an issue with other hardware as well. FreeBSD constrains itself somewhat by taking the GPL/BSD license only philosophical stand. Not all manufacturers are willing to work within that model which means sometimes FreeBSD has to forego the manufacturer's driver and wait for someone to develop a GPL/BSD driver." ..and finally: "The sound driver should be GPL according to the above license, but perhaps since it is bundled with the NIC driver which is non-GPL there is an issue with porting it to BSD. I think nVidia insists anything that it bundles together stays bundled together which would in FreeBSD's mind make the sound driver non-GPLed because it's bundled with the non-GPL NIC driver. Again, the whole GPL/BSD license vs non GPL/BSD license issue. Since the graphics driver is provided as a seperate, GPLed package, it is fine for FreeBSD, but the rest may have issues because of the bundling." Is this correct? Thanks Joe
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