On Tue, 21 Feb 2006, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
<rant> I just can't understand the stance of the kernel developers shutting out companies that are trying to provide drivers for their product. This is certainly more FUD fuel being provided to MS. Who are the kernel developers to tell a company to stop exactly what we need more of, -drivers- for their products. I think it may be time for the kernel developers to stop sticking their collective, holier than thou noses in the air and stop dictating what a distribution can and cannot include in their distribution, namely third party drivers. This is certainly going to drive a -LOT- of people back to MS. It is hard enough to get people to linux with the slow development of drivers, now it will be even worse. </rant>
And how exactly is a closed source Linux better than Windows? If anyone disagrees with the Linux kernel developers about licensing, he or she is free to rewrite the kernel from scratch or switch to any
I do agree with a lot of what the LKD's say. The problem is the social extreemes. Free VS Commecial. It is not easy to get these extreemes to exist or co-exist in a useable situation that frees business's from the MS shackels and FUD. This one company has been on UNIX/LINUX for 20 years and now is going to MS strickly as their current investment in HW looks like it is going to become unsupported. I presonally think they will be back as I do not believe MS has a working solution for them. But many business owners do not understand the technical debate and really are less tolerant of the extreemes. All they want is for the SW/HW to work and let them do what they do best. That is their nice in the market. (How they make thier money.) They do not get into the issues and really could careless. All they want is stuff to work. They pay for what the need or preceive as what they need. Not all the ...
of the *BSD variants. The kernel is not a special piece of software, linking closed source code against it is as forbidden as with any other GPL project. I personally welcome any obstacle thrown in the direction of binary only drivers because this is a clear way to communicate that vendors of said binary-only drivers are not tolerated. And it will make it easier to sue these vendors in the long run.
agreed, but ... What about bringing Linux to replace/displace/destroy MS. Eventually I hope for a NON MS computer OS world. They are free to do the other... Well I would like to see FLOSS/Linux replace MS totally. A MS free world.
As a side note, binary only drivers are an interesting target for reverse engineering. I already did that once and the new GPL driver was faster, more stable and (most important) free.
Yes, but to create them in a Clean Room Enviroment is not easy and takes
money. Where is this going to come from. I saw where stuff had to be
removed because it did not addhere to the Clean Room test and could be
seen as violating ...
Thanks,
--
Boyd Gerber