Should Linux Use Proprietary Drivers?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday April 18, 2006 @01:11AM from the bring-the-shiny-to-the-penguin dept.

Richard Gray writes "Should Linux accept proprietary video/graphics drivers from likes of Nvidia and ATI ? The GPL written by FSF says that the license prohibits proprietary drivers. From the article: 'To write open-source graphics drivers without help from Nvidia or ATI is tough. Efforts to reverse-engineer open-source equivalents often are months behind and produce only 'rudimentary' drivers, said Michael Larabel, founder of a high-end Linux hardware site Phoronix ... Torvalds has argued that some proprietary modules should be permissible because they're not derived from the Linux kernel, but were originally designed to work with other operating systems.' The FSF however, sharply disagrees. 'If the kernel were pure GPL in its license terms...you couldn't link proprietary video drivers into it, whether dynamically or statically.' Where do you fall on this issue?"

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Not in my kernel by ettlz · 2006-04-18 01:25 · Score: 5, Interesting

I used to think having a Linux kernel driver ABI would be a good thing. But then I started to change once I read about the OpenBSD ilk and their trials with wireless, RAID, etc. (and their recent "blob" song). My attitude these days is "not in my kernel".

Binary blobs prevent peer review for security. They are in themselves a security risk as any vendor could use them to inject God-only-knows what hooks into the kernel (Sony rootkit native on Linux, anyone?). And I'd be more inclined trust the quality of code from the Linux community above and beyond anything proprietary.

I'd rather go without. If we must have binary drivers, they should either be run in user-space through a strict Free-software gateway or provided as a safe byte-code for a driver virtual machine.