2008/5/21 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell(a)gmail.com>:
There are such things as non disclosure agreements that can prevent
publishing information. Why shouldn't you respect their legal obligations?
We're not saying they shouldn't. I am tempted to suggest they
shouldn't enter into those in the first place, that would be a large
can of worms though and we don't want to open another one of those
while we still have a large number of nematodes wriggling away in this
thread.
The binaries permit redistribution. How does that make it impossible
to
have in a repository?
Again, that's not the issue; the problem is that even when they *are*
in a repository, they don't work with the current X.org. I see at
least two popular third party repositories that do carry both the
nVidia and the ATI proprietary drivers; why are there so few
complaints from the ATI users about this state of affairs?
This seems to be speculation, seeing as how we don't have a
release and the
xorg drivers were done before they told anyone else the interface was
stable.
OK, so F9 is now not a release?
It may be legal commitments - but its their right either way and not
really
anyone else's business.
Yet everyone thinks it's their business to badmouth the Fedora project
because they haven't allowed NVidia's legal commitments to change the
Fedora project's aims and processes?
Open source is probably a tiny part of their business. The stuff
seems OK
on a Mac and I haven't seen this kind of complaint about Solaris which uses
essentially the same driver. But perhaps they do a better job of
coordinating their releases so all the needed components are ready before
users have to deal with it.
They'll have exactly the same problems if and when Solaris upgrades
their X server. The Fedora project doesn't sell hardware and thus has
less obligation (moral or otherwise) to provide for binary drivers for
their OS.