The end of Nvidia proprietary Drivers on Linux !?!

Judging by Linus’ words in this article, I’d say Oracle set president for that.

This licensing issue with NVIDIA is annoying, but I think everyone has some idea what they’re getting involved with when they tango with the GPL.

It is open source with a CDDL license. Period. Many open source licenses are called “proprietary” these days. When you read through the various articles in the web you will only find GPL and Proprietary. Everything not GPL is called proprietary. Check it out.

I run four NVIDIA RTX8000 , plus two AMD RX5700 to power my eight 8k monitors…

I am planning to completely get rid of my NVIDIA GPUs and go with upcoming AMD’s one, as from a scientist perspective, AMD is by far way more powerful in simulation of bosons and hadrons, stuffs like that.

Never been a fan of NVIDIA, always prefered AMD, but the RTX8000 was the most performant option for me at this time…

Now that NVIDIA support will be worse…

@The_Quantum_Alpha
this thread is not about “what is the best GPU” or “what do I like the most” or “my next gpu is xyz”.

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I know, i just will have to get rid of my NVIDIAs as the Linux support is getting more and more horrible…

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You seem to be rich enough to afford that. Congratulations. And thank you for sharing your opinion.

Be fantastic if that happened but even Linus said nvidia have been the single most difficult company to deal with. Can’t see them ever going open source but if they did what a boost it would be to linux gaming and linux in general

Hm, I wish i would be that rich…
It’s the company i work for that furnish that :sweat_smile:
There’s not merits on my side for that!

There is nothing wrong for a company to disclose their software. And since this is not about open source anyways but GPL I can fully understand nvidia. The kernel developers want to force nvidia to release the drivers under GPL. Most of the other available open sources license will not work.

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So if the NVIDIA driver has a different license will this affect Manjaro too? Do other kernel modules have the same issue for example does linking ZFS against GPL code change the kernel license?

The Common Development and Distribution License ( CDDL ) is a free and open-source software license […]. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers it a free software license, but one which is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).

from Common Development and Distribution License - Wikipedia

Some also believe that CDDL was specifically created in such a way to be incompatible with GPL.

I was specifically asking this question on ZFS github. The developers believe that zfs is not affected. They do not use any GPL symbols.

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The thing is that the Free Software Foundation acknowledges the CDDL as a valid Free Software license, but one that is not compatible with the GPL, and considering that filesystem drivers are to be loaded into the kernel ─ which is entirely licensed under GPLv2 ─ it would be illegal to ship openzfs as a standard kernel module.

However, if the module could be loaded via the fuse framework ─ just as is the case for ntfs-3g ─ then that would be a workable solution, because userspace does not fall under the same licensing as the kernel.

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I have seen a zfs-fuse package so why is this one not used by Manjaro if it is more compatible with the license of the kernel?

Manjaro follows Arch in that regard, and just like Arch, Manjaro isn’t aiming to be a fully FSF-approved distribution ─ if it were, then it wouldn’t be offering any proprietary drivers.

zfs is not supported in the default kernels, but kernels with zfs support are offered as an option for those who want it.

:man_shrugging:

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This is interesting to me because I have looked at Arch and one thing which was annoying is that they do not have ZFS modules in their repositories but Manjaro does so I wonder why there is a difference if Manjaro follows Arch. :thinking:

Look in the AUR ─ there are several zfs-related kernel module packages in there. :wink:

Also, when I said that Manjaro follows Arch, I didn’t mean that Manjaro would be an Arch clone. It simply follows Arch’s approach in this matter, which is that it’s okay to install zfs without FUSE, so long as it’s the user who chooses to do it ─ it must not be a default choice, for obvious reasons.

Holy crap did this thread turn into one massive :toilet: festival.

You wonder why overall Linux userland population makes up only one percent of the totality for desktop operating systems used worldwide? And what would developers who previously had an interest in supporting open source think about this? What would Valve think? They were the people who previously made SteamOS using Debian as a base and wanted to make their games work in Linux. There is no good news I am seeing here.

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Excuse me? Are you one of those gullible people who believe that the desktop computer usage of GNU/Linux ─ which has already long surpassed the 1%, thank you very much ─ would be the only market where GNU/Linux is deployed?

Just in case you didn’t know yet, about 70% of the entire internet runs off of GNU/Linux servers, as does the full 100% of the Top-500 fastest supercomputers in the world. GNU/Linux also powers mainframes and runs on most embedded devices. I’m not even counting Android, which is the world’s most popular mobile phone operating system, because Android isn’t actually GNU/Linux ─ it’s a modified Linux kernel with a userland mostly made up of Java byte code.

You’re (seriously) overreacting. Free & Open Source Software is the way to go. Nvidia is the odd one out that will need to adapt if it wants to survive. Intel and AMD are offering their drivers under the GPL.

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The issue is not linux, but the crap of Nvidia and AMD to use their drivers as a weapon to keep people locked into the windows ecosystem or apple ecosystem. Manufactures should sell products and allow them to work on whatever ecosystem.

This is a hold over of the Windows era to keep others from being able to use certain hardware on any platform but windows. That is why windows still controls the licenses for Nvidia to work on that platform. Has nothing to do with linux, but everything to do with stiffling competition.