Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 14th Dec 2006 03:00 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
"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:
2006-04-20
<quote> It doesn't matter if nvidia opens their drivers or not, there is a decent amount of work going into writing open source 3D accelerated drivers for nvidia cards:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ </quote>
From the nouveau site you linked to: "Currently, nothing works." They might be putting some work into it, but there is little evidence of a usable driver any time soon. I very much suspect that it does matter, as it will take them years to produce a functional driver, and it is likely to be very out of date and lacking in functionality compared to the nVidia one.
I would say that if Linux moves to this kind of restrictive, draconian policy of controlling what people use their computers and software for, people will move away from Linux as fast as you can say BSD, Vista or Leopard. Restricting people's freedom is not going to win Linux any new friends.
Linus is on the ball here, it is a shame about the other kernel devs.
PC-BSD and FreeBSD are very rapidly approaching the point of becoming a viable desktop OS, and are not encumbered by lots of silly licensing restrictions. If Linux gets carried away with some silly idealistic notion of "freedom" that is ironically the exact opposite of what freedom means to most people, Linux will fade back into being a server only OS, and has no chance of making it on the home or office desktop.