According To Fedora , it stated somewhere that pkgs like Nvidia for Linux & Abode Flash are or could be Illegal which is why they wont install these pkgs as part of its Installation etc.
Unless I miss understood what it said.
But how can pkgs like these be illegal if you can download them from the pkg site. Like you can download Nvidia Drivers from this site So how can they be illegal.
Can anyone ellaborate on this?
It has nothing to do with illegality and everything to do with philosophy. Some third party software and drivers are not distributed under the GNU public license, they are distributed binary only under more restrictive terms, so distributions choose not to include them. Nothing more sinister than that.
You can add the rpmfusion repositories which are not officially part of the Fedora repository system but work with it as described here:
[url=“Personal Fedora 10 Installation Guide”]Personal Fedora 10 Installation Guide
Then install your nvidia driver
[url=“Fedora Nvidia Driver Install Guide”]http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-nvidia.html[/url]
The rpmfusion one works with cuda, but I think some things like the profiler won’t work.
Thanks fellas For answers,
I Appreciate Link To Repo As well
TA"
Actually it does have something to do with legality (derivative works and all). Although the general consensus on lkml (as far as I can see) is that the nvidia drivers are legal, but those are opinions of non-lawyers.
Right, the tricky part here only relates to the licensing issues surrounding the binary kernel module that NVIDIA loads at boot. All the rest of CUDA is fine, just like any other closed-source application on Linux.
Im someone who likes to do whats honest all together & fair by others, So I Guess I may have to look in to it more.
AnyWay
I just found it hard to understand how if a company like Nvidia or Abode makes the decision whether to let out their code for drivers etc, or whatever it is that Linux & Nvidia do so that their own Products can be used on Linux could be Illegal to use if its up to them (Nvidia or Abode) to create the drivers & offer everyone the oppertunity to download & install them from their site was confusing to me.
I think I understand more why there seems to be alot of talk & opposition about Patents etc as I think its great that people have the oppertunity with free software to try & improve it if wanted for their needs or because they want others to enjoy what they know , as I think its one reason why software has improved so much as it also could mean more people are working on software rather than relying or hoping on some staff in a company to improve a product. External Image
Personally, I cannot see how any lawyer would call the nvidia module illegal. The source-base of the drivers existed (long) before NVIDIA started to support linux, so it clearly is not a derivative work.
It’s more difficult when you now develop a new card for a pc, and you start to make drivers for linux & windows. If you start from scratch with linux support, then the question whether your driver is a derivative work is a little harder.
This is not really what they mean. “Derived work” is given a specific definition in the GPL, and the question at hand is not whether NVIDIA somehow copied a bunch of Linux source code to make their drivers. This is all very complicated because binary modules are linked into the kernel at runtime.
This is a reasonable, but terse, summary of the issue, and Linus’s response:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2006/12/8428.ars
Frankly, I wouldn’t waste much time trying to figure this out. Distributions give users the option to avoid proprietary drivers as a courtesy to those who wish to run a completely open-source operating system. There’s no immediate legal issue with proprietary kernel modules, just a bunch of people who like to argue about such things. :)