GPL flag for x.org drivers

[Andreas Girlich]

On Tue, 15 May 2007 07:42:46 -0400
Thomas Dickey <dickey at radix.net> wrote:

> On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 01:35:24PM +0200, Andreas Girlich wrote:
> > > > Of course not.  You don't have to prohibit use of the code, but if a
> > > > closed-source driver is loaded, you can just note that you need to
> > > > contact the vendor of the closed driver for support, since we are
> > > > obviously unable to offer any.
> > > 
> > > That could be useful - but going back to the example given in the kernel
> > > developers, there's a large faction that would like to use that information
> > > to annoy developers of the non-GPL drivers.
> > 
> > Why should they become annoyed? I don't understand that. If a OSS dev
> > thinks he can do it better, he shall do so with his own code.
> 
> hmm - read the long digressions on the linux kernel mailing lists...
>  
> > The fact is, that if the vendors cannot help us (even though they
> > should), we need to help us by ourselves. Therefore we need the code.
> 
> That's a different slice of the discussion: how would adding a flag
> motivate the vendor into providing code?

Cause they want to have Linux users as their customers. At least, they
cannot afford to drop Linux support. I know that this means to force
them, but I don't know how often people talked about this topic and how
often it ended without a suitable result. Everybody loses time with
this issue.