Andreas Hanke wrote:
[...] Especially these two sentences:
"I, and others who hold copyrights on portions of the kernel are saying very clear things about this now, 'proprietary kernel modules are illegal.'"
"Oh, and at least one major distro has been served with legal papers due to them shipping closed source kernel drivers, and more are on the way."
Questions:
- Do you know who this guy named Greg KH is and which job at which company he currently does?
What will you answer him, and out of which position? Isn't the position of a long-term contributor and copyright holder slightly stronger than that of a user who doesn't do anything else with Linux than using it?
- Do you know which 'major distro' it is that has been 'served with legal papers'? Honestly, I prefer not knowing it, and I prefer not knowing which ones are on the way.
Andreas, I've meanwhile read quite a lot of articles about this topic, I know for which company GKH has worked in the past and for which company he's currently working, and all I can say about his position is: I don't really like it and I don't think that it does Linux users any good. I agree with you that those who really contribute to the Linux OS (kernel) should have more rights to influence the positions than people just using the OS, no doubt. I agree with you that it's much better to have open source drivers than closed-source third-party drivers. But, and this is the position I've had before, I think it's the wrong way to just "close the door" without an adequate solution in place. And from my point of view, this is exactly what GKH does. Maybe my point of view sounds naive for a kernel developer, but I've already seen many irrational statements from Linus, too... ;-) Cheers, Th. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-help@opensuse.org