Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 13:15:07 -0600 From: Joe Warner <rootman22@comcast.net> To: wpaul@FreeBSD.ORG (Bill Paul) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Nvidia Licensing Question Message-ID: <200307201315.07253.rootman22@comcast.net> In-Reply-To: <20030720180146.5E12F37B401@hub.freebsd.org> References: <20030720180146.5E12F37B401@hub.freebsd.org>
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Thanks Bill, I didn't think it had anything to do with licensing but I wanted to hear it from the horses mouth, so to speak. Thanks for the explanantion. -- Joe On Sunday 20 July 2003 12:01 pm, Bill Paul wrote: > > 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: > > [...] > > It has nothing to do with licensing. The NIC driver is _NOT_ provided > in source code form. Yes, they may have stuck it in a section that > says 'driver source code,' but if you actually download it and look > at it, you'll find that all of the brains of the driver is inside an > object module for which there is no source code. > > If the driver source code was available, then one of two things would > occur: > > - We would discover that the chip is in fact not nVidia's own design, > but a some other vendor's design which they have licensed (this is > what they did previously, when they licensed a NIC from 3Com). If > this turned out to be the case, and the NIC is already supported > by another FreeBSD driver, we could tweak it to handle nVidia's > chip. > > - We would be able to strip out all of the register and DMA structure > info from the Linux driver and write a FreeBSD driver (assuming the > engineer who wrote the driver didn't try to obfuscate the code or > was lazy about transcribing register info from the programming > manual). > > I would prefer being able to just get the programming manual from > nVidia and write a driver from scratch, but I don't have any nVidia > contacts or any info about why nVidia is being such a pain in the > ass about releasing info concerning this NIC. > > -Bill > > -- > =========================================================================== >== -Bill Paul (510) 749-2329 | Senior Engineer, Master of Unix-Fu > wpaul@windriver.com | Wind River Systems > =========================================================================== >== "If stupidity were a handicap, you'd have the best parking spot." > =========================================================================== >==
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