Nvidia Licensing Question

[Bill Paul]

> Hi,
> 
> I was talking to someone recently about why there isn't
> support for Nvidia's Nforce drivers under FreeBSD yet.
> 
> He said:
> 
> "This might have something to do with the fact that the NIC driver is not
> GPL licensed. See the "License" section of the nForce Linux readme:

[...]

It has nothing to do with licensing. The NIC driver is _NOT_ provided
in source code form. Yes, they may have stuck it in a section that
says 'driver source code,' but if you actually download it and look
at it, you'll find that all of the brains of the driver is inside an
object module for which there is no source code.

If the driver source code was available, then one of two things would
occur:

- We would discover that the chip is in fact not nVidia's own design,
  but a some other vendor's design which they have licensed (this is
  what they did previously, when they licensed a NIC from 3Com). If
  this turned out to be the case, and the NIC is already supported
  by another FreeBSD driver, we could tweak it to handle nVidia's
  chip.

- We would be able to strip out all of the register and DMA structure
  info from the Linux driver and write a FreeBSD driver (assuming the
  engineer who wrote the driver didn't try to obfuscate the code or
  was lazy about transcribing register info from the programming
  manual).

I would prefer being able to just get the programming manual from
nVidia and write a driver from scratch, but I don't have any nVidia
contacts or any info about why nVidia is being such a pain in the
ass about releasing info concerning this NIC.

-Bill

--
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-Bill Paul            (510) 749-2329 | Senior Engineer, Master of Unix-Fu
                 wpaul at windriver.com | Wind River Systems
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      "If stupidity were a handicap, you'd have the best parking spot."
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