"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.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-03-12
Then where do you draw the line. Linus intentionally leaves a grey area for practical(sic) reasons. The main reason its been adopted, grown out of all recognition is the Licence.
Do binary drivers hurt linux...absolutely. 3D on Linux Open-source or not is a poor on Linux. Would the situation be better in a years time if the binary drivers were removed?
Edited 2006-12-14 14:15
Member since:2005-07-06
I think one of the problems here is people are looking for a tidy, black and white solution. There isn't one.
Most companies don't find writing open source drivers prudent. Period. Unless they have motivation to do so (gains in marketshare etc), they will not.
ATI/NVidia never struck me as more than token supporters of Linux as it is. Tell them they need to open their drivers, and we may lose what little support we (users of Linux) have.
No matter what, I, as a user, should have the right to control what is or is not on my system. Not some maintainer/copyright holder. Dictate what I can/cannot do with my computer and you're stumbling into proprietary (eek, drm/trusted computing?!) territory. And defeating one of the chief strengths of foss software!
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