On Wednesday 24 January 2007 16:06, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
I note that nVidia and ATI have been distributing Linux-compatible drivers for a while now, and they're not in court over it.
Because the copyright holders haven't wanted to test their relationship with nVidia/ATi. The fear is that there would end up being no drivers at all (which is better IMO).
I don't use them, but from the discussions I've heard they get compiled locally, which strongly suggests that the source code is available, which would suggest to me that they're quit compatible with what I know of the GPL and open software.
The GPL is not compatible with everything open source. Either way, the only code compiled by the user is a small source code binding between Linux and a blackbox object file. Using internal data structures and functions from Linux, this binding is a derivative work of it, thus is required to be licensed under the GPL. Using internal data structures and functions from the incompatibly licensed .o blob, the GPL forbids its distribution.