GPL flag for x.org drivers

[Alan Coopersmith]

Andreas Girlich wrote:
> On Tue, 15 May 2007 16:20:08 +0200
> Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> 
>> Because some Xorg contributors are companies distributing such binary
>> drivers.
> I think you meant a developer / producer of such binary drivers.

Actually, far more of the contributions come from OS/distro vendors who
ship binary drivers with their OS, or have customers of their OS who
depend on binary drivers.    A couple nvidia employees contribute, but
that's pretty much the limit of contributions from binary driver vendors.

 From the perspective of the mostly-open-source OS vendor I work at, we'd
love to see ATI & nvidia follow Intel's lead and open their driver sources,
but we're also pragmatic and prefer closed-source drivers over no drivers
(as in the ATI Radeon x1000/x2000 series) or drivers with less features
& performance (as in the nvidia case).    (Right now, with Solaris, we
ship all the open Xorg drivers, nvidia's closed drivers, and tell
customers to avoid ATI Radeon cards since the open drivers have
no support for R500+ and the closed drivers aren't ported.   If the
drivers were open, we could port them ourselves instead of having to
try to convince the hardware vendors our platform is worthy of their
time.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering