On 28 Nov 2021, at 18:00, Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us> wrote:
On 11/28/21 2:59 AM, Tim via users wrote:
> So, if they can do that, why can't we do something similar? Or at
> least, automate figuring out which driver needs installing. There's a
> look-up chart that we have to manually trawl through, can't we pull
> that data into some software?
We can't do that for the same reasons that the drivers can't be in the official
Fedora repos: they're closed source binary blobs, not open source. Ubuntu can do that
because they don't have the same restrictions that we do.
It used to be that the NVIDIA license needed the end user to accept its conditions.
Having anyone but the end user install the NVIDIA driver was explicitly
not allowed. In a previous job we wanted to bundle the NVIDIA driver
with a linux product and could not get NVIDIA to agree to a suitable license
to allow this.
I'm not sure how Ubuntu has work around license issue.
What this means for Fedora is that there are two barriers.
1) its close source.
2) the license prevents fedora from doing the install automatically.
Barry