Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Aug 2006 17:50 UTC, submitted by Moulinneuf
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:2005-12-02
"> Personally, I do not see the problems with NVidia's
> approach.
But I do, because end users having to build drivers themselves is just ugly, painful and in no way a permanent solution."
I never looked at it that way to be honest, as I am more technically inclined so that much was and is never an issue. That is a very good point however. And for the rest of your post, thanks for taking the time, as it is well written. You made some points that I knew actually, just have been forgotten in a way as it is so transparent, such as the Windows USB subsystems. I imagine if I were a developer it would be more evident.
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Member since:
2006-03-17
> There is no freedom with Linux, as the Linux
> developers decide what you can and can not use.
It's just a matter of fact that when we are talking about copyrighted software, the copyright holder can make some basic decisions. This does not conflict with the free software definition - free software is still copyrighted software.
It is definitely possible to have a fully working and supported hardware configuration on a Linux desktop or laptop system. There are hisax supported ISDN cards, there are i810 supported graphics cards, there are ALSA supported winmodems and there are ipw2200 supported wireless devices. What you can't do at the moment is buying arbitrary hardware and expecting that there are OSS drivers for everything - this would be nice, but is currently not possible.
If I didn't know that Linux does not yet have the necessary adoption as a desktop system, I'd say that it is the OEMs' task to make sure that all components are supported. See, Linux today supports much more hardware out of the box than Mac OS X ever did. This is a fact.
And why is the perceived situation that Linux works almost nowhere out of the box? Because Linux is not preinstalled by OEMs and because people are trying to install it on arbitrary crap hardware. This might change in the future, commercially supported desktop distros like SLED or Ubuntu LTS will push this process forward.
> It is that attitude that has chased me back to
> windows after 9-10 years, because things just work
> and are stable there.
This is a very honest statement and it is indeed the proposed solution for those who are already dependent on proprietary drivers.
The whole thing is mainly about preventing people from becoming dependent on these drivers.
And yes, you are right: Everything is stable on Windows. And why? Because Microsoft has the resources to maintain 4 USB subsystems, a current one and three legacy ones which are just kept for compatibility. The Linux community just doesn't have the resources to do that, it is a lot of additional work, a lot of code duplication, it increases the number of points of failure and a notable run-time overhead.
> Personally, I do not see the problems with NVidia's
> approach.
But I do, because end users having to build drivers themselves is just ugly, painful and in no way a permanent solution.