ParadoX Inc

Looks like some RMS wannabe claiming to be a kernel developer has ‘ordered’ Kororaa to stop production because it includes the nVidia and ATI drivers on the LiveCD. The post and thread on this is mostly full of people saying the email is a farce and to continue with the project, after all it’s freely available and nobody is making any profit from of this.

I agree with a lot of the posts but the project should continue with some caution, add a few disclaimers about “Non-GPL drivers being used” since this seems to be more or a moral then a legal issue, to me. Chris has not received any offcial C&D notice (aka a letter from a lawyer), if he does then yes he must stop. But until then he has no reason to stop development on a free product.

Removing the drivers from the project are not possible because of the dependency XGL has on accellerate OpenGL, the open source drivers (nv and ati or radeon) do not supply the accellerated support for the environment. Without these drivers there is no project, unless he adds support to compile the drivers on boot which will extend the boot time by about a minute. I can see this as an option if a cease and desist letter is received, even then there is a good possiblilty that once a judge gets the case he’ll throw it out since it’s entirely a moral issue and nobody is losing/gaining profit from this project.

I maybe entirely wrong but I don’t think there is a case here other then someone disagreeing with how something is used, which would be a civil case at best. To quote Dennis Miller “Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.”