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Proprietary Parts in OLPC Project Draw Criticism
An anonymous reader writes "The Jem Report is running a story about the recent controversy surrounding the hardware used in OLPC laptops. Some devices require NDA's to write drivers, and some parts require firmware that cannot be freely redistributed. Richard Stallmann and Theo de Raadt oppose the use of such devices. Jim Getty defends OLPC's choice (de Raadts response). Jem Matzan has interviewed all sides and published the answers."
Between propriatary or nothing at all, its understandable why the project picked propriatary.
Note to RMS fanboys: Life is full of COMPROMISES. Sometimes you have to take a little bit of the "bad" to accomplish something good. Having RMS out there spewing because of things like this does NOTHING to help people's opinion of him, OR HIS IDEOLOGY.
In case you were wondering, RTFA stands for Read The Fscking Article. If you RTFA you won't wonder what OLPC stands for, and if you were wondering what OLPC stands for you didn't RTFA. This is modded as informitive!!??? Rule of thumb modders: if the post doesn't tell you anything you couldn't have gotten by reading the damn article, it is *NOT* informative!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This is phenomenal! Has the Slashdot "gene pool" really become so tainted that the act of pointing out that regurgitating a portion of the first line of an article is *NOT* being informative, can be misconstrued as trolling? Fscking amazing!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Is it OK if every child has a laptop but the parts from their old one are leaching lead into their water supply and they are too dumb to use them? Driver maintenance helps keep hardware out of landfills.
So in summary, closed drivers poison children? I'm glad you're not a zealot - you might have come out with some really absurd, over the top shit.
Anyway, there is an open driver for the Marvell wireless chip. The problem is that it's GPL'd. Which means it will take effort for the OpenBSD crowd to re-write it because "it's not free enough". Sounds like selfish whining to me.
I don't see why they didn't just use OpenBSD for the OS. Then they could make the whole thing closed and proprietary and nobody would be able to do a thing about it. If that did happen, what would your reaction be? Please do reply - I'm genuinely interested in how you would deal with that eventuality. Would it be "free enough" then?
RMS: "Let them eat cake!"
This is my assessment of RMS's possition. I've tried with bitter tennacity to maintain a considerable degree of respect for RMS obver the last few years, but here he's lost me.
If his possition realy is that it would better if these children had no laptop at all, than one that uses even a tiny seed of proprietary software, even temporarily, then he's he realy has lost the plot completely. Back when he started GNU he used proprietary platforms because nothing else existed. Now he's saying nobody should ever use proprietary systems even if they have no other alternative. This smacks of hypocrisy.
And an alternative firmware has nothing to do with de Raadt, quick trying to distract from the topic at hand, which is to say you being a fucking sellout.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.