On 2/22/06, Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 05:03:52AM -0500, Benjy Grogan wrote:
> Is there a way of including proprietary drivers with the Fedora Project?  In
> time, Nvidia, ATI et al will definitely have the best available linux
> drivers for their hardware so it seems inevitable that proprietary drivers
> will have to be included in Fedora.

Fedora is free software. If you want to add proprietary software whether that
is Nvidia drivers, Oracle or Quake 4 then its between you and the vendor. The
Nvidia and Ati drivers are actually more tricky than the proprietary
applications to deal with because their legality is open to some dispute.

> They're giving away their drivers for free anyways.

Only in price, and then you pay a terrible price if you want to debug anything
or your system isn't stable

With all the myriad hardware out there the open source community cannot possibly develop drivers for everything.  It seems to me that the open source community figures out the architecture, and the hardware goliaths develop their drivers within that architecture.

Of course, it would be great if the hardware goliaths open sourced their drivers.

Benjy