[Linux4christians] Legality of Nvidia Drivers

[Ben Thorp]

Just to re-iterate and add to what has been said before:

As an individual user you are not only legally allowed to use the drivers,
but you are encouraged to do so by nvidia ;) They even provide additional
gfx configuration tools for Linux. However, because of the licensing of the
drivers, distributions have to pay a fee if they want to _distribute_ the
drivers, so none of the free distros do. Some of the pay-for ones, I
believe, have paid the fee - I expect that Linspire do, although I haven't
checked.

The 'ethical' issue is another story too - many people don't use the
drivers because they are not 'Free' (as in freedom) because the source code
is not available. The Free drivers, which are not produced by nVidia, work
fine for most desktop applications, but you will struggle if you do
anything 3D with OpenGL, ie games, or some of the new fancy stuff with Xgl
or AIGLX.

There are arguments both for and against this, but that's probably for
another time.

Oh, and as an addendum, if you _are_ using any binary drivers (like the
nvidia ones) then the kernel dev's won't support you should you require any
help, although most of us aren't in the position of requiring help from
kernel dev's ;)

Ben