[Linux4christians] Legality of Nvidia Drivers

[AKAImBatman]

Okay, long story short. The NVidia drivers come from NVidia who gives users
full rights and permissions to *use* the software. There's no charge to
download them, and the license doesn't place any unreasonable restrictions.

The matter you're pointing to is the issue of redistribution. i.e. OpenSuse
can't redistribute the drivers without NVidia's permission to do so. Only
NVidia has the right of redistribution, so permission must be obtained from
them first. Many of the commercial distros do this, but for the 100% OSS
distros, this is a bit more problematic from a legal perspective.

I'm not going to bore you with a long lecture on the subtleties of
copyrights, but suffice it to say that you're in the clear. You can feel
free to come back to this question if you ever decide to make a distro or
some other method of distributing the drivers to others. :-)

AKAImBatman

On 6/18/06, Don Bedsole <dbedsole at carolina.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> What is your take on the legality of the Nvidia graphics
> drivers?  OpenSuse
> doesn't distribute them because some kernel developers feel that they
> kernel
> modules may violate their copyright. See this page
>
> http://en.opensuse.org/Restricted_Formats.
>
> Is it legal for an end-user such as myself to install and use it if I
> download
> and compile, and install it myself?
>
> --
> For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that
> whoever
> believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
> (John 3:16, WEB)
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> Linux4christians at thelinuxlink.net
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>
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