Hi, Thomas Hertweck schrieb:
[...] And it's still often considered to be "more free" or "more open", which I tend to find rather unfair sometimes.
Is this really what the end user is worried about?
No, probably not, and nobody stated that. I'm just trying to explain *why* the user's winmodem didn't work in a default installation and *why* it will probably not work better in future default installations of (open)SUSE, and actually I doubt that other distributors can continue with proprietary kernel modules in the same way they are currently distributing them. Maybe one or two years, but not more. The "pressure" from actual Linux contributors and copyright holders (not users) is too high. The situation with the packages from CD6 is different because none of them is considered to be in violation of any free software license, but the proprietary kernel modules are, and very few users seem to be aware of that. This was not meant to be a philosophical statement about the pros and cons of distributing proprietary applications - especially since (open)SUSE *does* distribute proprietary applications - but about the legal situation of proprietary kernel modules in particular. Let's hope that, at least for winmodems, ALSA will solve the problem even better in the future than it does currently, Andreas Hanke --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help@opensuse.org