I wonder though, if I package say a .so file from nVidia, is that allowed by the license?
https://docs.appimage.org/reference/best-practices.html#bina...
There are several automation tools to make AppImages, but they won't magically allow you to compile on the latest Fedora and expect your executable to work on Debian Stable. It's still require quite a lot of manual labor.
It won't work: drivers usually require exact (or more-or-less the same) kernel module version. That's why you need to explicitly exclude graphics libraries from being packaged into AppImage. This make it non-runnable on musl if you're trying to run it on glibc.
https://github.com/Zaraka/pkg2appimage/blob/master/excludeli...
It makes me wonder, does the OS still take its job of hardware abstraction seriously these days?
Any .so from nvidia is supposed to be one of those things. Because it also depends on the drivers etc.. provided by nvidia.
Also on a side note, a lot of .so files also depends on other files in /usr/share , /etc etc...
I recommend using an AppImage only for the happy path application frameworks they support (eg. Qt, Electron etc...). Otherwise you'd have to manually verify all the libraries you're bundling will work on your user's distros.
You generally still also have to abide by license obligations for OSS too, e. G., GPL.
To be specific for the exampls, Nvidia has historically been quite restrictive (only on approval) here. Firmware has only recently been opened up a bit and drivers continue to be an issue iirc.
