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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."
That much of the silicon we're building *hasn't even taped out yet* (we're testing FPGA versions before they become ASIC's right now). Yet open source drivers for the hardware are already publically available (e.g. NAND driver, camera driver, SD driver).
- Jim Gettys
RMS and Theo are trying to use this project as a soapbox to further their own political views, and that disgusts me.
Those political views created open source, without which the OLPC project could not achieve its goals.
These are all good people doing good things, and they mostly share the same goals. There's a disagreement over which of the goals is most important, and some of them (Theo) tend to be a little bombastic, but there's nothing to be disgusted about.
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RMS has been very civil in our extensive mail exchanges.
Theo de Raadt, on the other hand, has not been civil in the slightest.
When was the last time people felt locked-in by device drivers?
You're kidding, right? Device drivers are one of the largest sources of computer lock-in ever. In fact, it was a device driver (a printer driver, to be specific) that motivated RMS to start the Free Software movement. Until the last couple of years, device drivers were the most oft-quoted reason why switching to an F/LOSS operating system wasn't feasible, and they're still very high on the list.
Device drivers matter. A lot. Maybe only programmers deal with them directly, but end-users certainly feel the pain when they're not available or don't work.
That said, as I mentioned in another post, this conflict isn't about device driver availability or even device driver source, it's about device documentation. Theo wants it, Marvell won't give it, Getty and company have found a way to work around the issue by getting it under NDA so they can write open source firmware and drivers.
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The straightest path for the project may have been OSS, but I seriously doubt that OSS is the ONLY WAY.
Yes, it is the only way, because OSS is *part* of the OLPC project's goals. The project not only wants to provide laptops, it wants to provide *open* laptops, so that kids in impoverished countries can poke into the internals and learn how their computers work, and how to change how their computers work. The project wants to help educate a new generation of programmers and computer scientists as well as provide all of the other educational benefits. OSS is critically important to that goal.
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