On 7/22/05, Jeff King <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let's say I write a program in C code and compile it to assembly > language, which I distribute. Somebody else writes an equivalent program > directly in assembly language and distributes it. The distributed > products contain the same amount of information about how they work. > > How is one of these free and the other non-free?
Nothing stops us from considering the evidence of the upstream developer's intent when they release a program in a less than perfectly maintainable condition. It's natural that they know some things about it we don't, but if it seems obfuscated beyond the limits of good faith, somebody should blow a whistle. We know perfectly well that the NVidia driver is in the condition it's in partly because its development is funded by a profit-seeking entity that has no wish to destabilize its market position, either by making it easier for a competitor to produce a graphics chip to which the driver could easily be ported, or by losing its privileged relationship to Microsoft when an inspired Linux hacker reworks the driver and related bits of the Linux graphics subsystem to get triple the FPS of the Windows (or XBox) version. (I think triple is probably an exaggeration, but there's room for improvement.) It's very clever of NVidia to support both a fully proprietary Linux driver and a driver we can call "open source" if we don't look too closely. Do we mind being manipulated this way? A little, but we work with it. That's an extreme case, but the fact is that upstreams do all sorts of things to the code and documentation to pursue agendas at best orthogonal to, and often in opposition to, their users' and especially potential forkers' interests. [I was going to add another rant about the FSF here, but got bored with it.] Cheers, - Michael
