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Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 12:17:21 -0400
From: Alexander Kabaev <ak03@gte.com>
To: David Leimbach <leimy2k@mac.com>
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cc: Steve Kargl <sgk@troutmask.apl.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: policy on GPL'd drivers?
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On Tue, 27 May 2003 10:49:40 -0500
David Leimbach <leimy2k@mac.com> wrote:

>  
> On Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 10:40AM, Alexander Kabaev <ak03@gte.com>
> wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 27 May 2003 10:32:42 -0500
> >David Leimbach <leimy2k@mac.com> wrote:
> >
> >>  Ugh... the network driver portion of the nforce drivers is *not*
> >>  GPL'd but it
> >> has a linux only and anti-reverse engineeing clause.
> >> 
> >> Dave
> >
> >Then using the diver on FreeBSD will be a NVidia's license violation,
> >wouldn't it? One more reason to keep it out of the tree.
> 
> Just the network driver... the audio driver in the tarball is still
> GPL'd.

Well, network driver is a special case as it is this weird binary
'kernel' + OS shim combination which is getting popular lately. Have you
thought about getting NVidia's permission to link non-GPLed shims with
their binary object?

A quick scan through NVidia audio driver sources suggests that the
device is very similar to Intel ICH2 AC'97-based cards. Should you see
is BSD-led ich.c driver can be reused instead of the Linux driver?

-- 
Alexander Kabaev