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NVIDIA Is Joining the Linux Foundation
Norsefire writes "NVIDIA is joining the Linux Foundation, along with three other to-be-announced companies. From the article: 'As one of the three big makers of graphics chips for PCs--the other two are Intel and AMD, both of which are longtime Linux Foundation members--Nvidia's increased participation in Linux could be big news for users of the free and open source operating system.
Nvidia has long taken a closed approach to Linux drivers for its graphics cards, offering only a proprietary one and declining to participate in the open source Nouveau driver project, which has depended instead on reverse engineering.'"
Hedging my bets on Apple, Microsoft and McDonalds.
From the first article:
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The summary implies that the submitter thinks this is going to improve things with respect to their graphics drivers. Come on. Not likely. They're doing this as an ARM manufacturer, NOT as a GPU manufacturer.
Fuck off then.
I am wondering how meaningful is that membership for end users.
I haven't had any problems with Nvidia's proprietary drivers and Intel drivers included in Linux kernel work out of the box.
On the other hand, ATI/AMD drivers has been an endless story of something "not ready yet", despite their long time Linux "commitment".
Personally, I want something that works and is reasonably easy to install and don't care much about "memberships".
(running a binary installer from Nvidia after each kernel update fits the bill and has been flawless so far, speaking from my experience.)
As for graphics, I'm under the impression that ATI/AMD graphics cards still rely on OSS drivers, that those drivers have historically performed miserably, and that ATI/AMD has never made an attempt to make them better.
Meanwhile, nvidia's released (proprietary) drivers for X for at least a decade. I just hope this isn't nvidia's way of distancing themselves from supporting X...mylaptop depends on their X driver!
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Will ARMnix become the new Wintel?
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
Does that mean that the Linux commodities finally got tweak the Nvidia drivers to the point that they can get to squeeze the last drop of performance out of Nvidia graphic chips?
If yes, welcome to the Linux Foundation
If no, then what's the meaning of joining?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Posting anonymously, as I was deeply involved with the OSDL. I attended a number of their high-level meetings as I work in the IT industry and was asked to contribute. What I saw was a lot of Powerpoint among CxO types who talked about being the "center of gravity" in the Linux world. Most were guys who just wanted a cheaper operating system so they could get rid of proprietary Unix...not much love for the cost of Solaris + Veritas in those rooms. They were all eager to get a free-as-in-beer OS that would save them millions a year.
The OSDL had zero ability to get RedHat, etc. to modify their plans. RedHat is very enterprise-friendly, but that's from directly working with their customers, not through OSDL.
Anyway, funding dried up and that was that.
Wikipedia says the LF has "narrowing their respective focuses to that of promoting Linux in competition with Windows". Well, good luck with that. Jumping from an enterprise focus (OSDL) to a consumer focus (LF) would pretty tough for people who have their act together...and the OSDL crowd never did. After a couple years I found myself asking "what is the point of all this? we talk and look at powerpoint, but I don't see any actual change coming out of this organization," and so I left.
1. RTFA.
2. It does not mean any of that.
3. It means that they're pumping money into Linux. For what means... speculation includes the Tegra platform (which really is not a bad speculation at all), but who knows. You also have Oracle, Adobe, etc. in that list that have little to no support for Linux with their software (or other questionable attributes).
The thing that I don't get is how everyone talks as if Nvidia's Linux video drivers are far behind AMD's because they are not open source. Yes, it would be nice if they were, but in my experience they are far superior in terms of actual stability and performance. Using ATI/AMD graphics in Linux has been a living nightmare in most cases for me. The open source drivers are missing features that are in the proprietary ones, and as soon as I install said proprietary drivers everything turns to crap if it hadn't already. In fact if I recall correctly, both Firefox and Flash Player only support hardware acceleration in Linux if you are using Nvidia; since they are the only drivers that are stable enough. Do correct me and don't flame me if I am wrong. In any case, it would be fan-friggin-tastic if all the Linux video drivers were completely open-sourced, but it looks like licensing, patents, and good old fashioned bureaucracy will keep that from happening for a while.
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
I don't think they will ever open-source their drivers. It would be embarrassing for them when others discuss their code, they are protective of their work, etc. All you can hope for, and what you should be demanding, is that they give more specs to the nouveau team.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
It means that they meet the requirements for membership* and have paid their membership fees. Which basically means they're throwing a bunch of money into a pool intended to promote, support, improve, and defend Linux and other OSS projects and developers. And getting a tax credit.
Does that mean [other stuff]?
No.
If no, then what's the meaning of joining?
It means that they've thrown a bunch of money into a pool intended to...blah, blah. And gotten a tax credit. And the right to say "Member of the Linux Foundation" on their website and other promotional materials.
* Membership is open to "...individuals and entities that engage in or support the production, manufacture, use, sale, or standardization of Linux or other open source-based technologies." (Emphasis mine.) Note that you don't even have to engage in the use of Linux--you merely have to support it (whatever that means).
Not as long as there are ex-SGI people in the place that can tell their stories about the insane amount of time wasted in court over graphics software patents. So long as the patent trolls have to do some work to determine what Nvidia have they are a little bit safer from them.
It's just another insane direct consequence of software patents.
Nvidia's consistent support for near flawless video drivers is why I won't even consider anyone else. I wouldn't even be using linux if it weren't for them. I can't think of another computer company that has so ensured my product loyalty.
The Tegra platforms have not gotten a lot of traction in the Linux kernel development world, generally because they put all their GPIOs in the wrong place for udev and want to put all of their board-specific GPIO renaming in #ifdef's rather than putting them in separate platform description files.
This is particularly egregious for things like the auido jacks, which due to poor code arrangement, never end up sending udev events to subsystem audio, and instead send them to platform.
I would be very happy if the only thing that came out of it was that the names they assigned to pins in the source code matched the names that they have on their technical specifications instead of having weird-ass names for everything. Right now you have to translate through three layers of indirection to figure out what you have to poke to pull a pin high.
Really, what the ARM folks need to do is get together and decide on an ISA like the Intel/AMD/IBM/yada-yada folks did so that as engineers it posible to target a single real platform. Yes, I realize that would tend to commoditize them, but they are already budge also-ran chips.
-- Terry
I would imagine the opposite. They are not a software company. They make most of their money on hardware.
You also have Oracle ... in that list that have little to no support for Linux with their software (or other questionable attributes).
Oracle? I mean sure Larry's O-monster is definitely one of the major Big Evil Corporations(tm), but you can't say they have no support for Linux. Hell, the flagship product Oracle Database has been available for Linux (and even certified on several distros) for at least 10 years now -- I was running 8i on a Slackware box back in 2003!
Many years ago, they came out with their own Linux distro (based on RHEL), and now you can even get a turn-key solution that includes an "appliance" server, which runs their software ... get this ... on Linux! They will fully support you with mission-critical issues, as long as you pay for the support contract ;)
Furthermore, most people don't even know that Oracle has dedicated team of paid staff that does nothing but work on FOSS. One of these projects is OCFS2, which I have personally been involved with (as a user & community member, not a developer) for 2-3 years now and has recently become part of the mainline Linux kernel.
Oracle is (partly) a Linux company: they sell and support their own distro. After the Sun acquisition, they also own Java, which is used pretty extensively on Linux.
Adobe up until very recently supported Flash on Linux. It may be free, but it was an important part of their business strategy before HTML 5 came along.
They were the only ones who made a GPU driver that actually both worked and performed well. Whether or not it's open source is of secondary consideration - give me a fucking GPU driver that actually pumps pixels!
Oracle and Adobe may not have been the best/most interesting examples. (I think the fact that Oracle has an extremely pricey "Platinum Membership", representing a half-million dollar investment, says all that needs to be said about that. They're clearly pretty serious about Linux, whatever the Linux or Slashdot community may think of them.)
Some really surprising names (at the Gold/100k USD level) are Nokia and Sony. They've invested as much as SUSE (the only pure-Linux player at the gold level) and Google. Of course, Sony is a big company, and just because their games division seems to hate Linux, that doesn't mean that the company overall isn't a huge user/supporter. As for Nokia...I got nuthin'.... :)
Toyota is also a Gold Member, which is not as shocking as seeing Nokia or Sony on the list, but I still find it a little surprising that they're willing to sink six figures into general Linux support/promotion/defense. I had no idea they even used it. I certainly don't expect them to open-source their drivers. [Insert car analogy here.] :)
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
Nope. The reason for this is that both ATI and NVIDIA license a lot of code that is in their drivers.
Does that mean that the Linux commodities finally got tweak the Nvidia drivers to the point that they can get to squeeze the last drop of performance out of Nvidia graphic chips?
This is a joke, right?
Furthermore, most people don't even know that Oracle has dedicated team of paid staff that does nothing but work on FOSS [oracle.com]. One of these projects is OCFS2, which I have personally been involved with (as a user & community member, not a developer) for 2-3 years now and has recently become part of the mainline Linux kernel.
As I understand it, OCFS2 got sidelined for no good reason by some idiot at Oracle, of which there seems to be no shortage.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Oracle is (partly) a Linux company: they sell and support their own distro.
They try to. It would seems the vast majority of their DB customers do not really want to buy LInux contracts from them, I wonder why that would be. In truth, Oracle is not a Linux company, they are a DB company that relies on Linux plaform installations for a large and increasing share of their revenue.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Does that mean Nvidia gonna open source the driver for the graphic cards using Nvidia chips?
I don't think they will ever open-source their drivers. It would be embarrassing for them when others discuss their code, they are protective of their work, etc. All you can hope for, and what you should be demanding, is that they give more specs to the nouveau team.
Of course that is all that the community wants. Why should NVidia have all the fun of writing kick-butt driver code? :-p
I guess NVidia must be getting awfully close to taking that step. I would say, just waiting for a suitably high profile occasion to announce it now. Stranger than fiction: they have some strong OSS advocates on the inside.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I'd be happy with just a optimus binary driver. As it stands some laptops running linux can't even access their graphics cards properly.
And if you make money from software, you want the hardware it runs on to be as widely available as possible. Thus you maximize profit.
Not rocket science.
Right now I have 28 very nice Nvidia GPU's ticking away computing determinants of large matrices for me -- and this is just to estimate how much computer time I will need for the real calculation, which will use on the order of 100K GPU-hours. The high-performance computing crowd is switching from conventional supercomputers to Nvidia GPU's as fast as the code can be written.
These things ain't cheap: the new ones that they're putting into clusters cost $1.5k each, and I bet the profit margin on them is a lot bigger than on Geforce 555M's. More importantly this is an avenue for Nvidia to dominate the high-performance computing market, especially if they do things like implement a way for a GPU on one node to talk to a GPU on another node (by a direct-to-Infiniband link or something), bypassing the PCI Express busses. (Right now it's GPU -> PCI Express -> RAM -> Infiniband -> RAM -> PCI Express -> GPU.)
Needless to say the overwhelming majority of these machines run Linux. (Your average physicist can't even imagine what a Windows supercomputer would look like. I sure can't.)
You can't be serious? Look at the OP's UID. These guys practically invented Slashdot's "Never RTFA" rule.
Which has their own linux distribution.
1. RTFA
You can't be serious? Look at the OP's UID. These guys practically invented Slashdot's "Never RTFA" rule
tl;dr
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Unless you're on a laptop with an optimus chipset, in that case you're up shit creek with no paddles and a leaking boat.
-- Linux user #369862
He beat me by a day or so. The bastard.
I guess NVidia must be getting awfully close to [open-sourcing their drivers]. I would say, just waiting for a suitably high profile occasion to announce it now. Stranger than fiction: they have some strong OSS advocates on the inside.
Not going to happen, not that way for the same reason AMD can't open source their Catalyst/fgrlx drivers. Licensed code, patents, DRM, competetitive advantage, clues about future products and improvements and absurd amounts of lawyer time needed. They'd almost certainly have to go down the same route AMD has, announce an open source strategy and start building a driver from scratch (or nouveau), release blocks of programming information bit by bit and will probably lack certain bits like VDPAU, just like AMD still haven't been able to release any UVD information 4.5 years into their open source project.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Maybe it could make a difference; NVIDIA joining the Linux foundation. So far, on openSUSE, their closed source drivers available via YaST repos fail to detect the installed NVDIA card in most of the cases. Since the bundled nouveau driver isn't good enough, currently the only alternative to get them working is to compile their default proprietary driver(s) into the kernel.
My experience couldn't be more different.
Using nVidia's proprietary drivers in my laptop is instability hell.
It crashes my mouse and trackpad within seconds of booting up (have to restart them with modprobe), suspend/resume is a crapshoot, and sometimes would just lock randomly (though that might be just general Gnome 3 suckiness).
Moreover, desktop animations get progressively slower and choppier.
None of these problems with the open source drivers. Well, Gnome 3 still crashes from time to time, but in a different way.
The problem with the open-source drivers is that I can't control the screen brightness, the battery seems to go out a little bit faster, and it crashed when using the new accelerated Google Maps (haven't tried it for a while though).
Caveat: this is on a Sony laptop, which I only learned later, has some of the crapiest Linux support among laptop manufacturers.
I guess NVidia must be getting awfully close to [open-sourcing their drivers]
Why did you put words in my mouth, then do the straw-man thing? What I meant - for anyone who did not see it clearly from context - is that NVidia must be close to opening their register specs.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Quite a number of distros are created not necessarily from original root distros such as Debian/Redhat/Slackware/Gentoo, but from any other distro - it's simply the nature of FOSS. If a distro is successful, it's one measure of its success that there'd be derivative distros based on that. The same is the case w/ Mint - it is one of a handful of linuxes that are based on Ubuntu, some others being Bodhi, Comice, Pinguy, Zorin, Backbox and more. Each of them, while derived from Ubuntu, has something or the other to differentiate it. Comice, for instance, takes Gnome3.2 and makes it look like an OS-X desktop.
Ubuntu users could have gone to any of these once Unity hit. Mint took the initiative of actually finding out why people were leaving Ubuntu for Mint, and recognized that Unity aside, even Gnome3 was a problem. So they came up w/ all sorts of options - MGSE, Cinnamon and MATE, and gave their users the option of staying w/ the older GNOME2 forks. They also offered them the options of other DEs, such as LDXE, XFCE and most recently, KDE. In the meantime, while Ubuntu was making its user base its guinea pigs on Unity, they also announced that they'd be dropping support for Kubuntu. Don't be surprised if Xubuntu and Lubuntu follow, so that the only people using Ubuntu are those who like Unity.
For this reason, I disagree that the examples of CENTOS and Mint are identical. CENTOS, from what you describe, decided to simply offer RHEL free to its customers but w/o any service contracts, which is indeed leeching of it. But that's by no means what Mint has done - they've actually checked why users came to them in the first place, heard them out on their grievances about the DEs, and offered as many options as they could to make them happy. I'd say that they deserve that succcess. You could point out that they essentially leeched off Ubuntu, but by the same definition, Ubuntu too 'leeched' from Debian - they took the Debian Linux distro, and added their improvements, just like Mint, Comice and the others did w/ them. Incidentally, in addition to Mint's normal Ubuntu derived OS, Mint also has a 'Mint Debian' distro, where they do the same things here, except that they start w/ the original Debian base, rather than Ubuntu's. I dunno whether that's for their servers - maybe it is, given that Debian's server OS is a lot better established than Ubuntu's.
Back to TFA, I think the reason any company balks @ Linux is the idea that it would have to provide GPL'ed drivers. I wouldn't blame them @ all for being reluctant to do it, given that by doing so, they're pretty much giving their competitors - in addition to their customers - the secret about what makes them tick. One solution is binary blobs, but then, problem then is that not all Linux (or BSD) distros would have the drivers for that particular card, and the vendor then has to make a call of whether to skip that customer base or not. I think one solution might be to write some basic drivers for the card that have its minimal functionality working, and publish that, but for any drivers that are optimized for the best performance and power consumption, make those proprietary or binary blobs. Yeah, there are some distros which in the full spirit of RMS/FSF will refuse to touch those, but that's their problem.
because it was the most reliable linux distro at the time (and maybe still is)?
factor 966971: 966971
"But, having given it out as GPL, they now get access to a million geeks who will do free support and bugfixing on the code."
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!...oh wait, you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA owww, my sides...ohh thanks, that's the hardest I've laughed in ages! Because Linux is known for having rock solid drivers that never break, snort, snicker guffaw! lets face it friend, your driver model is shit. its always been shit, and as long as Linus Torvalds has a pulse it will always BE shit, why? Because he likes it that way and because he knows that SEVER companies, which is where he makes his money, will jump through his hoops so he don't have to give a crap. this is ignoring the fact that every. other. major. OS on the ENTIRE planet has a driver ABI, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, hell even OS/2. Is Linus THAT arrogant, that he thinks he's smarter than EVERY OS designer on the planet? yep. Eeeeegggoo come and it won't go away. Mark my words 3 weeks after Torvalds drops dead there WILL be an ABI and it'll be hailed as the second coming, Well unless the replacement for Linus is a follower of the great smelly one in which case they will continue with the already disproved RELIGIOUS argument against ABIs (the ONLY one I've seen provided BTW, kinda funny that an OS would have a religious movement whose job it is to maintain "purity") which is of course "ZOMFG they might provide a...gasp, shock horror...binary blob ZOMFG!" which of course ignores that the number one GPU for Linux and the most used driver in Linux is Nvidia drivers which are....survey says....binary blobs!
You want to know why hardware manufacturers ignore you THIS is why. With just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers you can support Windows for more than 20 years, no more work required, you just need a 2K/XP/2K3 32 bit, XP X64/2k3 X64, WinVista/7/8 32bit,WinVista/7/8 64bit, and tada! you've just covered EVERY use case for your product on Windows, even the non popular and server editions. With Linux you either pay a team of driver developers to constantly update the things when Torvalds breaks them yet again, or you leave your company to the not so tender mercy of some "hacker dude" you have ZERO control over who may or may not make a decent driver out of what you give him. See AMD hiring driver guys to help the Open Source guys for an example of how that can cost you money for zero gain.
So waste your mod points, crawl back into your perception bubbles going "La la la, everything is beautiful, la la la!" but the honest ones will know I'm right. Linux has suffered from the "busted shitter" problem for years and frankly it isn't getting any better in that regard. what are the busted shitters? its the REALLY hard, thankless, shitty, long hours,crappy jobs that never get done because nobody is willing to waste years of their lives on them for free. trying to have a really functional driver model WITHOUT having ABIs is one of those busted shitter problems which is why others like BSD and Solaris adopted ABIs. But there are many busted shitters in Linux, the lousy documentation, lack of QA and regression testing, upgrades breaking bog standard hardware because of lack of oversight, hell remember when Linux USED to laugh about Windows having to install clean to upgrade? Don't laugh about that now that all the distros tell you to do the same thing huh? that's the busted shitter problem in a nutshell.
IMHO the sad part is things didn't have to be this way, the community could accept the busted shitter problem and work to route around the damage. tell Torvalds it ain't 1993 anymore and to either come up with a way to magically fix the driver issues or STFU and give you an ABI, take up collections to offer bounties for really nasty busted shitters like upgrades breaking bog standard hardware or lack of docs, but instead its a giant perception bubblepaloza, where everyone trips over themselves to talk about how "leet" they are and just can't seem to understand why after 20 years Linux is still lower than the margin for error on the desktop. I mean you
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Minimum requirements: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/295.20/README/minimumrequirements.html
[sorry for the poor formatting] /proc/version /lib/libc.so.* > 6
Software Element Supported versions Check With...
Linux kernel 2.4.7 and newer cat
XFree86* 4.0.1 and newer XFree86 -version
X.Org* 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12 Xorg -version
Kernel modutils 2.1.121 and newer insmod --version
glibc 2.0 ls
* It is only required that you have one of XFree86 or X.Org, not both. Sometimes very recent versions are not supported immediately following release, but we aim to support all new versions as soon as possible.
binutils 2.9.5 size --version
GNU make 3.77 make --version
gcc 2.91.66 gcc --version
The times I've heard of the Linux Foundation, it has either seemed a PR group, or actually opposed to FOSS. I'm not at all sure I should be pleased that they are getting another influential member. Remember, the name is not the thing. OTOH, I've only seen them mentioned in an occasional story, and read a few of their PR pieces. These aren't highly reliable sources.
So what does the "Linux Foundation" do that is supportive of FOSS?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Because a sysadmin was allowed to pick technology and ensure job security for as long as they wanted. Smart admin, dumb company.
Well if Mint is actually spending money to try to offer a better product then i humbly apologize, its not CntOS which is just stripping out the copyrighted material in a product they USED to pay for and handing it out to their customers. That doesn't change the fact that for all the community's big talk of "Support us and we'll support you!" that CentOS is now on 2/3rds of the servers out there, just proving that communism is a giant failwhale and that greed wins out in the end. Because there is NO company that gives more back than RH, yet the very same community they give to then rip them as much as they possibly can. and look at Canonical? how many millions did Shuttleworth sink into trying to give a Linux that worked for the masses? in the end they'll have to close their doors and join the ranks of Xandros, linspire, gOS, novell, in the "We were never able to make a penny" group.
In the end I think it comes down to a complete failure of ideology, in that its been proven time and time again communism doesn't work and that's what RMS wants with the GPL, a communist utopia. the ONLY reason that Linux works in servers is because MSFT has a truly byzantine licensing schema and truly insane prices for server OSes which makes it easy for a company like Red hat to sell their product because when you have a thousand servers its cheaper to pay for Red hat support than it is to pay for MSFT licenses. But this is also why it will NEVER work on the desktop, because the desktop suffers from what I call the "busted shitters" problem which is also a problem the communists had, going so far as to have to order soldiers on 'potato duty" to get the lousy jobs done.
You see in servers a company has a problem, problem costs company money, so they pay to fix the problem. in desktops because anybody can copy what you've done there simply isn't any money to be made fixing problems as Canonical is finding out and when you rely on volunteers the busted shitters simply don't get done. its simply human nature, everyone wants to be the artist, nobody wants to be the guy that cleans and fixes the busted shitter. Now there are some seriously busted shitters in Linux on the desktop that anybody but a zealot would be willing to admit is true, just a few off the top of my head are the lousy driver model that practically guarantees multiple broken drivers each release cycle, lousy QA and regression testing, incomplete docs that are either practically worthless lists of CLI use flags or worse a "to be done' placeholder, lack of consistency of UI, these are all SERIOUS problems, yet they never get fixed, why? Because they are ALL busted shitters. They will require months or even years of long, boring, dull, thankless, truly shitty work to be done. Now again its simply human nature that if i'm donating my time I'm gonna want to do something i enjoy, and we humans are creative creatures which is why you'll see new release after new release of software with frankly show stopping bugs. Making something new is exciting, fixing bugs is not.
In the end without a complete rewrite of the GPL (which RMS will die before allowing) so that a company can actually charge money for doing these thankless jobs they just don't get done and THAT is why Linux is frankly going nowhere on desktops. even the best estimate in favor of Linux I could find has Linux at 4.9% and that is skewed by being strictly the most geeker heavy sites on the web. think about that for a moment, 20 years, countless man hours, and Linux is BARELY beating Vista which was the most reviled and hated MSFT OS since WinME. If that isn't proof the current model simply doesn't work i don't know what does. With each release both Windows and OSX gets better and if anything I'd argue that Linux is backsliding. Linux USED to laugh about how Windows had to install clean, while ignoring the fact that Windows has such a long tail when it comes to support that most will outgrow their hardware before they need to upgrade, but they
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I have no idea whether or not Mint is actually spending money - I just observed that there are innovative things that Mint is doing, and not just leeching off other distros. In fact, I think that Canonical's Unity has not been adapted by any of the Ubuntu based distros, so what you are saying - Shuttleworth sinking millions in order to make a Linux that's usable for most people - has only been partly copied. Given that most of their efforts to that end have been on the Unity DE, nobody has been leeching off him there. Now, I dunno whether you think that if FOSS produces bad software, Linux users should be expected to support it on ideological grounds, but one of the things about it is supposed to be that FOSS makes things that everyone wants, which has been disproved for Unity and GNOME3.
On the GPL question, the GPL does allow people to charge money for its software - that's not exactly the issue. The issue, as I see it, is what Comrade rms calls 'Freedom 2' - The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. That is what makes it a deal breaker for most people. Normally, any company, while selling software, can provide its customers w/ the source code, and charge whatever it determines is the right price that would allow that business to be sustained. Problem w/ the GPL is that it prevents companies from preventing downstream users from distributing it, so that in the end, the customers can potentially become unpaid distribution arms, as well as competitors of the original vendor. It's this aspect of the GPL that's toxic.
Let's say I have a company called Acme Software, and sell you something for, say $20. I also give you the source code. However, i also want to sell it at that price to other people - I don't want you to sell it, and essentially rob me of a revenue stream. I'm perfectly happy for others to get the source code, and improve it for themselves, but again, I don't want it redistributed, with or without the improvements. Problem is that GPL prevents me from stopping you or anyone else from distributing it, essentially ensuring that my customers are allowed to become my competitors. If the GPL was just about Freedoms 0, 1 and in a restricted way, 3, it would not be anti-business. But it's its insistence on redistribution rights that make it communist, not so much the insistence that source code always accompany the software whenever it changes hands. RMS can call it 'helping your neighbor', but for a company that lost the opportunity to sell that software to that neighbor for the market price - what the market will bear, it's nothing but a business killer.
Actually unity fits in perfectly with your point in the second and third paragraphs which hits the nail on the head. You see Canonical isn't going with unity because it WANTS to, its doing so because it simply HAS NO CHOICE. they HAVE to have something they can sell on tablets, or netbooks, or something, just to keep the lights on. because sadly you've hit it dead bang on why the GPL is going nowhere fast and other licenses are doing better, because there is simply ZERO way to make money fixing the problems if the first guy you hand the code to can turn right around and undercut you thanks to having no R&D costs. Why the FOSS community can't seem to grasp something that is so blatantly obvious is beyond me but it has made corporations avoid GPL like the plague because it IS toxic. Ultimately TINSTAAFL and when linux needs at a minimum a good 60 million plus worth of work and polish to bring it up to what the current offerings of the competition are? Well as someone who has been trying Linux since 2000 I can say that while Windows and OSX have made some truly incredible leaps Linux on desktops has been nothing but a disappointment.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I guess you didn't get the memo - slackware is pretty much dead nowadays - the package browser/repo has been broken for almost a year, and most ftp/http sites only have a couple dozen updates available (if I had seen that before downloading 13.37, I wouldn't have bothered. What use is a distro with no updates between releases?)
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.