In a change of heart, Novell has ceased distributing proprietary software modules such as 3D video drivers that plug into the Linux kernel. The change came with Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10, released in July. With the move, Novell is aligning itself with the Free Software Foundation, which shuns proprietary software in general but in particular loathes proprietary modules that run as a component of the open-source Linux kernel.
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Member since:2006-03-17
> Until companies open up their hardware, any license
> restriction is just a farce
Why? The GPL works really exceptionally well for all kinds of different devices *except*
- graphics gards
- passive ISDN cards
- software modems
And most interestingly, it's always the same vendors who can't comply with the GPL:
- ATI
- NVidia
- AVM
- Conexant
=> Suspicious.
The vast majority of devices is supported by the vanilla GPL kernel, you just don't notice it because it's perceived as amatter of course that everything works out of the box, but it isn't.
Member since:2005-12-02
"Why? The GPL works really exceptionally well for all kinds of different devices *except*
- graphics gards
- passive ISDN cards
- software modems"
You forgot Some Raid Controllers, Current AHCI Implementation, Webcams that are not ancient, Protocols that they refuse to implement even though the libs are available such as yahoo voice and video..I'll stop now... None of these work "Out of the box", and are all important to true desktop adoption. There is no freedom with Linux, as the Linux developers decide what you can and can not use. Linux serves it's use as a low end development desktop machine or as a server. It does not suit a true desktop with denying the right to use proprietary modules. Not everyone is a developer, I am not, so I don't want to hear the next drivel about 'Write your own'. I do not have those skills, and the kernel and OSS distributions developers only listen to those that can write patches, they don't care what people want or bug reports filed. It is that attitude that has chased me back to windows after 9-10 years, because things just work and are stable there.
Member since:
2005-07-19
Well, GPL sucks without having common stream opensource hardware. I havent seen downloadable schematics of any motherboard, networkcard, soundcard or videocard yet.
Until companies open up their hardware, any license restriction is just a farce and so are discussion about using closedsource drivers or not.
having opensource hardware should be mandatory for having opensource software. my 2 cents.