Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 14th Dec 2006 03:00 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
"It's always an interesting day when you get to write a kernel patch, at the urging of Andrew Morton, that notifies the world that non-GPL Linux kernel modules will not work after January 2008 and write some poetry all in the same message."
More here. Hopefully, many closed-source drivers will be opened during the next year if this patch goes through. Update: Linus responds.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
While I'm all for enforcing the license/copyright - this is bull.
Seriously. Linux and the GPL are supposed to be all about Freedom. Sure, it needs to remain open - and the GPL (though it has a few flaws) does this well (imho).
The problem is that in many cases these are just individuals or small organizations that use these drivers. I doubt many enterprise Linux customers are installing Nvidia drivers (sure, sure, some might).
So...how's this hurting Linux? How is me installing a driver to make my system as functional (3D wise) as my Windows machine somehow violating copyright?
If Joe Linux installing the NV/ATI driver just to try to make his system comparable is somehow illegal/against the developer's wishes, then when this happens Linux will lose a lot of users. Will it die? Not likely. I'm afraid it will be relegated to a RISC type place in the OS world though.
Maybe I should start looking into BSD