Kevin Carmony Responds to Criticism

sharkscott writes to tell us that LXer's Don Parris took a few minutes to get Kevin Carmony's response to the large amount of criticism he has been taking over offering non-free software in Linspire. From the article: "Essentially, Carmony's position is that, in ten years of holding out, the FOSS community has made relatively few gains, in terms of convincing vendors to release libre codecs and drivers. In other words, the strategy doesn't seem to be working. Additionally, while some will be patient, most users would prefer to have something - anything - that works in the meanwhile."

Comments

It had better be sandboxed.

[r00t]

Ever try writing a 1 to the /proc/self/seccomp file? That blocks everything except read/write on already-open file descriptors, exit, and some stuff for returning from signal handlers. On x86, the cycle counter is disabled too.

The alternative is an extremely strict SE Linux policy, but seccomp is probably better for this job. One could use both at the same time I suppose.

I don't want some spyware crap telling Sony/Microsoft/Real/Sorensen about everything I do and probably acting as a backdoor.

Linux supports mp3, but that's not the issue

[MarkByers]

The distro I use, Gentoo, lets you play mp3s easily. In fact most Linux distributions do. I don't think it's a controversial issue that people want interoperability with their closed format files.

But that's not the issue people have with Linspire.

how it works

[r00t]

Lack of backwards compatibility would "doom all driver projects to eternal development", except that kernel drivers are updated by whoever breaks backwards compatibility. This is why drivers need to be in the official kernel source tree. Driver authors often sit back and relax while other people make the required changes to all drivers in the tree. Updating the drivers is often a robotic task, often taken on by the "kernel janitors" team.

This usually keeps the less-popular drivers alive for many years, though not forever of course. Linux just recently lost support for the PC-XT hard drives that came in 5 MB, 10 MB, and 20 MB sizes back in the early 1980's. (these never shipped with a 386, but people sometimes put the old drives in newer machines) It is unlikely that any of these drives still work.

Linux Incompatibility List

[DavidNWelton]

A couple of years ago, the 'Linux Incompatibility List' was created to track stuff that doesn't work with Linux:

http://www.leenooks.com/

It may not be much, but it has the advantage that it points out what to avoid, and it's community maintained - with all the hardware out there these days, no one person can know about it all.