On Wed, 6 Feb 2008 12:28:10 -0800 Greg KH <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 09:14:48PM +0100, Christer Weinigel wrote: > > On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 12:34:18 -0800 > > Greg KH <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > In the end, it's up to the copyright holders to enforce the > > > license. And as I have stated in the past, a number of them have > > > made public statements as to what they think about this issue. > > > And it corresponds exactly with what Marcel has stated above. > > > > > > So if you wish to violate the copyright of others, you take the > > > risk that you might be caught and punished, something that you > > > and your legal council needs to take into account. > > > > So when do you sue Nvidia, ATI, Atheros, Broadcom[1], > > M-Systems/Sandisk[2] or Nokia? All those companies distribute binary > > drivers for Linux without providing source code? > > How do you know that such legal action isn't already happening?
I don't. But AFAIK no such lawsuits have been made public so far. ATI/AMD are moving in the right direction already, looking at open sourcing their drivers. (How is that going by the way, I haven't had time to keep up lately). And that I guss might be thanks to the competition from Intel on the graphics side. Or is it due to legal pressure out of the public eye? Or has ATI just realised that the Linux market is big enough that going open source might gain them enough market share to be worth is? Anyway, I'm definitely going to vote with my wallet the next time I buy a laptop. My last laptop had an Intel graphics chip, because of the open source graphics drivers. I chose to buy a slower Intel chip instead of a faster Radeon model. And if something comes out of ATI before I buy a new one, I'll have to graphics chip manufacturers to choose from. But would ATI really have been interested in open sourcing their graphics drives now if they had been sued out of the water a couple of years ago when they did their first binary drivers for Linux? I don't know. /Christer - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
