"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
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:2005-07-02
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.
I'm wondering, though...has anyone actually made any serious attempts to convince them to go open-source? I agree that threats won't work (and may have the opposite effect), but how about trying to reason with them? After all, making their drivers open-source would make things a lot easier for them, as they no longer would have to maintain them.
I wonder how serious the community has been in trying to establish an ongoing dialog with these two companies...
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