Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

Posted Feb 28, 2008 9:32 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves? by jmayer
Parent article: Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

Well, one can speculate that, but how can this come true? NVidia then might not work on a kernel.org kernel, but a simple patch would remove this limitation. The legal question about the NVidia kernel module is about the same as the ndiswrapper discussion: Both are designed to load a Windows driver module (or something very similar to such a module) into the Linux kernel. Both wrappers are available under the GPL, and therefore compatible with the kernel license. The modules they load are not designed for the Linux kernel, and therefore not a derived work.

One can argue that creating such an interface is a Bad Thing(tm), like a plug-in interface to GCC has been considered as such, but that's it (even though I agree to the argument). And the kernel is "tainted" when a Windows driver runs in its space; but for a license that excludes any warranty whatsoever, the consequence of "tainted" is not that important.