Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 24th Jun 2008 12:07 UTC
A constant thorn in the eye of many Linux kernel developers is the existence of closed-source kernel modules, most notably those by Nvidia and Ati, but also some file system drivers and other elements. Most of the Linux developers have been against these modules ever since they were first used, and in fact, bug reports originating from a tainted kernel are often disregarded and ignored. The kernel developers have now rallied together by issuing a statement urging vendors to release open source Linux kernel modules and drivers.
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Member since:
2006-08-29
This part of your comment is nothing but border line trolling, if not, a plain braindead snarky retort. It angered me because I know from the later parts of your comment, with regard to Xorg, that you are reasonably well read with regard to the state of the open source Free Desktop and must know what you wrote is stupid.
Iceweasel was not born out of 'some debian developers' distaste for Mozilla branding but rather the distribution of Mozilla's trademarked branding hindering efforts to exercise right already granted under the GPLv2 to every Firefox user to freely modify and/or redistribute the software.
If you want to use 'Firefox' on Debian, noone is stopping you. Go download the official binaries or build the tree from source with the branding intact. You can even apply those debian patches. Just don't distribute it as 'Firefox'. Seems fair to me.
As for the rest of your comment, yeah NVIDIA do a fantastic job in providing Linux drivers. But there are also downsides to their closed and relatively small Linux development effort.
What about support for new X features? EXA? RandR 1.2? Why are they not working with Intel to bring better video acceleration API's to the Free Desktop? Kernel-mode modesetting? How about the terrible 2D rendering performance? Go ask a Cairo developer about this last one, or browse NVNews).
None of the above is about slamming on NVIDIA. I love that they provide the high quality drivers they do. But all of the above could theoretically be implemented a lot faster if they open sourced their drivers under the GPL.
Of course there are pros and cons to all development models...