Should Linux Use Proprietary Drivers?

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?"

Comments

Plug and play?

[djsmiley]

Well it would be nice if nvidia and ati opened the drivers....

Linux must expand to succeed. This is a fact, at the moment it is still very much a small percentage of what windows is (At least in desktop form, and as we have mostly headless servers, this is what we are really talking about, linux on the desktop.)

The FSF have their ideals, and the GPL attempts to enforce them. However, at the end of the day, its the user who has to put with with the "nv" driver instead of nvidia's own nice driver. Its the end user whom has to compile it all together to work.

Linux NEEDS to work, out of the box, and work well. Now either the FSF have to realise this, and allow the drivers to be built in OR someone needs to come up with a cureall solution which fixes this problem. Either way, until that point, adverage joe isn't going to use linux and understand how to do all his driver installs and understand why the nvidia driver isn't just "working".

I love linux, i use gentoo and i think its awesome. I also would love to spread linux to my friends and family, but many things hold me back, its this kidn of thing which causes problems.

Until linux has the "plug and play" power of windows (yes windows is bad but it has somethings right), then we can't see linux taking on windows in the desktop scene anytime soon.