[Gllug] Hypothetical GPL question

[Alain Williams]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 11:24:44AM +0100, David Damerell wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 Oct 2001, Simon Stewart wrote:
> >I seem to recall one of the major graphics chipset vendors released a
> >deliberately obfucated XFree driver, much to the discontent of the
> >community. There was precious little anyone could do about it,
> >though, because a) the company didn't _have_ to make the source
> >available and b) the source _was_ there and readable.
> 
> [It was, of course, the idiots at nvidia.]
> 
> What people did do about it was reject the driver as a useful free
> driver, just as they would have done if it had been binary-only; so
> this supposed 'loophole' in the GPL made no difference at all to what
> people could do about it.

The other advantage of what they did was to allow it to be compiled for a new Kernel.
The fact that you couldn't modify the driver is a different matter.

-- 
Alain Williams

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