video cards

[Luke -Jr]

On Thursday 03 April 2008, Jeffrey Watts wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> >  Torvalds has nothing to do with why I'm here. If Linux didn't exist,
> > we'd be using either HURD or a BSD kernel.
>
> You gave me a chuckle, especially the reference to HURD.  I do not
> mean to slight the contributions of the Berkeley crowd or of GNU, but
> Linux was the catalyst for the mainstream use of Free software and the
> current Unix renaissance.  It's possible that it could have happened
> in another way without the efforts of Linus, but then again, GNU
> struggled for years unsuccessfully to make a kernel.  Writing a kernel
> from scratch is far from a trivial act.

HURD is taking long because of its goals to surpass most existing kernels, and 
having had numerous rewrites. Both are likely a result of having a working 
kernel in Linux, and if Linux had not existed and BSD's kernel not forked, I 
think it very likely the complexity would be put off and a simplistic HURD 
completed a long time ago. At this point, this line of discussion has become 
purely "what if" and therefore pointless, so I doubt it's worth continuing.

> Furthermore, BSD does not share your philosophy, and thus it's absurd
> for you to suggest that you'd be having an argument about a GPLed
> kernel if we were all using BSD.

Nothing in the BSD license prevents a GPL'd fork.

> All significant parties - the guy that wrote the GPL, the guy that
> wrote Linux - say what nVidia is doing is okay, and that the issue
> isn't what they are doing, but is instead a limitation of the license
> itself.

Greg, the guy I quoted earlier, is a Linux developer and copyright holder. 
Furthermore, none of the developers nor RMS are IP lawyers. The only citation 
of IP lawyers thus far in this discussion has been that binary modules are 
illegal.