On 1/2/07, Bernd Petrovitsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
While this is true (at last in theory), there is one difference in practice: It is *much* easier to prove a/the patent violation if you have (original?) source code than to reverse engineer the assembler dump of the compiled code and prove the patent violation far enough to get to a so-called "agreement" on the costs.
On 1/2/07, Alan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You are forgetting the 11th commandment - thou shalt not get caught. Most software patents (actually quite probably most patents) are held by people who don't have the skills to go disassembling megabytes of code in search of offenders.
The list of features which the driver supports is going to be sufficient evidence for 99% of patents that relate to computer graphics hardware. Regardless, in the *millions* of dollars that it costs to prosecute a patent violation case I think they can find a few grand to throw at a disassembler jockey. So I'll take back what I said.. it does make some difference whether you release patent violating source code or patent violating binaries. It makes about a 1% difference to the overall cost of prosecuting a patent lawsuit. Now if you are done speculating why nvidia might have a reasonable reason for not releasing source code, can we just take it as read that the most likely reason is that they simply don't want to because they don't see the benefit? If that's the case, what benefit can we offer them? Trent - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
