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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?"
The simple fact that FOSS developers have not been able to produce good GPU drivers despite reverse-engineering demonstrates the level of complexity involved.
Sorry, but not only is that comment totally stupid, it's very insulting. The fact that FOSS developers can create drivers without programming docs AT ALL just shows how fucking talented they are. They have a level of skill that most manufacturer driver engineers can only dream about in envy.
As someone who has run proprietary software for most of my life (since the Mac 512 we got when I was 7 years old) and liked it, I think this is largely bullshit. Not that Linux hasn't been a positive force in the computing world, and that the values behind it are great and all, but that the impact being touted is way overblown. Sit and think for maybe 3 minutes, and you can probably come up with a dozen other factors that make the computing landscape what it is (e.g. better, faster, mostly bug-free drivers). Key examples: improved development methods, and increased consumer demand. And anyone that claims Linux has had a bigger impact on usability than Apple is either a troll or a politician. I use Fink and install a lot of GNU software, and I like it. But I DONT like using Linux for anything that can't be dome from the command line. I am truly glad OS X isn't open source. While I like a certain amount of customization, I really don't feel like spending 6 months fine tuning an OS installation, let alone a decade figuring out how to do such fine tuning.
And being paid by a company that uses your app somehow puts you out of the community now?
Not really. The licence says "thou shalt not link with proprietary code and distribute the resulting binary!"
Why don't you at least read the licence (or one out of the couple of millions of commentaries on it)? At the very least, you should understand that the very purpose of the GPL is to prevent that.
Then come and tell us what the FSF or Linux can or cannot do. Only then.
Thanks.
That is irrelevant. The original post claimed that OEM's had better programmers and therefore we should want them to be the only people writing drivers. The example of the network drivers was simply to say that we know that OEMs do not always have the best programmers, or at least that they don't get the most of of what they do have. There is no reason to suppose that this is any different for video OEMs.
TWW
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