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 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.