Subject: Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
From: Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at>
To: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Cc: =?iso-8859-2?Q?Pawe=B3?= Sikora <pluto@agmk.net>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <20051206202902.GC17108@redhat.com>
References: <1133779953.9356.9.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org>
	 <200512061649.14470.pluto@agmk.net> <20051206190051.GA4232@irc.pl>
	 <200512062011.55234.pluto@agmk.net>  <20051206202902.GC17108@redhat.com>
Content-Type: text/plain
Organization: http://www.firmix.at/
Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:25:52 +0100
Message-Id: <1133911552.3299.37.camel@gimli.at.home>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 1219
Lines: 30

On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 15:29 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
[...]
> Indeed, anything newer than a G550 is binary only as far as 3D is concerned.
> Sad, as Matrox used to be a really good recommendation for an
> opensource friendly graphic card vendor.
> 
> It's not as if their newer cards are even that fast, so my only
> guess is that they've gone the binary blob route purely for
> paranoia reasons.

Yes, the "software as such patent" and/or "trivial patent" disease
spreaded the last decades - not only in USPTO-land (and identically in
JPO-land) but also basically illegally in EPO-land.
And it is probably much simpler to "prove" (in the law sense, not
technically/mathematically) a patent infringement if you have C source
of the driver instead of some undocumented blob of object code.

	Bernd
-- 
Firmix Software GmbH                   http://www.firmix.at/
mobil: +43 664 4416156                 fax: +43 1 7890849-55
          Embedded Linux Development and Services


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/