GNOME and KDE software (the stuff Windowsites are going to be using anyway) support Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V just fine.
The "no clipboard contents after app is closed" complaint isn't valid in the presence of the GNOME clipboard manager.
Really, I think I best heard the justification for the select/middle-click interface once -- the middle-click-pastes is *not* copy and paste. That's C-c and C-v. Middle-click-pastes is just a more evolved interface to drag-and-drop, which has extremely similar functionality.
The write support is only partial and extremely limited. You can overwrite files, but not resize them using the modern driver. The old driver *did* let you enable write mode, but it would trash ACL stuff, corrupting the filesystem for Windows use.
I remember when I used to think that people would be driven nuts by stupid, unnecessary animations all over their desktop. Well, *I* still am, but there are plenty of people that use Aqua.
Of course, Apple didn't put in "per keystroke sounds", so maybe it isn't as bad as one would think.
OTOH, Aqua+AIM with clicky keystroke mode enabled *is* equivalently annoying.
release early and often, Im certainly not going to use something that claims to be a "security" tool if I cant view the source to see for myself just how "secure" it is.
No, see, it's a private joke. The "Spinning Cube of Impending Doom" roots your network operations center, thus resulting in your doom.
I purchased my second new Saturn SL-series in 8/2002. I just had to take it in for a slipping clutch (at 29,900 which is unheard of as far as I am concerned). They offered me a rental car for free, service that would be finished the next day (probably because they were paying for the rental), and it was all under warranty. Now, like I said, it is unlikely that user error caused a slipping clutch at 30k but it is possible. No questions asked. Seems like they weren't trying to place the blame on the user here and just fixed the damn thing. I wonder if they didn't cover the first time or two and then told her to fuck off and started charging her for wasting their time?
You know, I've read numerous times and places that Saturns have really good service and support, but not being an auto nut, I had no idea whether it was just part of a big Saturn marketing effort.
FAT32 is anything but slow. It's probably at or near the top of the list of fastest filesystems. It's so simple, how could it not be?
s/FAT32/bubble sort/
I'm afraid that I can't agree with you.
"Simplicity" doesn't mean much from a computer science standpoint (Does little code need to run? Few disk accesses required?)
One reason why FAT32 is slow is that its space allocation data structure looks something like a linked list, whereas traditional *IX filesystems look like a tree. To seek to a random point in a file on FAT32 requires O(n) time where n is the filesize. To do the same on *IX filesystems requires O(log(n)) time. A linked list is a poor data structure for position-based seeking because it doesn't take significant advantage of the fact that blocks can be pre-ordered by position.
IIRC, the DDK is not freely available and redistributable (IMHO, a pretty awful thing for an OS vendor to do).
Also, writing Windows device drivers is -- how do I put this -- not very much *fun*. It's *hard*, extremely labor-intensive, there is not equivalent to Linux's "merge into the mainstream kernel" which means that people avoid breaking your code with their own feature additions, since Microsoft isn't going to take your code.
Finally, I can't think of all that many problems with NTFS. The main problem is that Linux can't read it -- but honestly, computers are so cheap these days (A friend just threw out a Duron 700 machine the other day) that it's easier to just have a Linux box and a Windows box than try dual-booting.
I guess hassling with removable drives is a bit of a pain in the ass.
Really, ext2, ext3, reiser, jfs, and xfs are all pretty much general-purpose filesystems. Yes, they all have particular areas in which they perform somewhat better than the others, but it's really not worth ripping your hair out over. I'd be more likely to choose something based on the few features that differentiate them (ext2 is forwards-compatible with ext3, or that reiser can optionally give up some speed to store small files more compactly).
If you are give code you don't have copyright to to a free project, what leverage do they have to ensure you were behaving well?
Oh. Oh, I see. I was thinking of the point of view of the copyright holder.
Yes, I see your point...but them I'm heavily swayed by the fact that I've yet to see deliberate code stealing by the open source world (there was the case where the Linux networking guys used BSD code without proper attribution -- it's okay to use code from BSD, but they weren't aware that they also had to attribute it, but that was accidental). There's mplayer's bundling of binary codecs (which pretty clearly violates EULAs) but that isn't anything that went into mplayer code, just stuff that you can install yourself that they pre-packaged for you. It's maintained separately from the mplayer codebase. There are a lot of companies that I can think of swiping open source code. On the other hand, in almost every closed source environment that I've been privy to, I've seen some degree of copyright infringement.
I'm sure that at some point, someone will steal code, just by the law of averages, but I'd be willing to say that open source projects are more likely to be legally clean than closed source projects.
Finally, I think that there's some reasonable psychology behind this. In CS classes, there's always going to be those people that don't want to write code and end up cheating, stealing code from other sources or people. These people aren't interested in doing things *right* or interested in the development itself or proud of what they've done -- they're just interested in getting the reward (their grade). In general, I've found that these sorts of people do not wind up doing open source projects (the volunteer open source types). Volunteer open source projects require people to derive a great deal of pride in their work or just like development, or else they wouldn't be out there producing code without being paid. The people who dislike writing code are largely not going to be part of this group.
Surely you would consider copyright infringement to be part of the law? It's more universal (no per-state exceptions as often affect employee contracts).
It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be legal full "drop-in replacements" for the id pak files simply because the maps must be identical to interoperate (not just "kinda work similarly) and the maps are copyrighted by id and were never made free-as-in-beer.
It is entirely possible that people will just start using new (freely-available) maps, however. For example, the Team Fortress maps are freely redistributable.
I am not sure if there has been a project to fully reimplement the Q1 models (it'd be neat if someone did higher-poly-count versions).
ATI has both closed and open drivers. I use exclusively the open ones (the ones that are part of DRI). I guess your definition of Free depends on your opinions on the matter, but I think that most people wouldn't have a problem with the MIT license that XFree86 (well, now called xorg) uses.
but at least one of them produces stable,
I play bzflag without problems, though I've had occasional hangs when playing NWN -- not common, though, and pretty much on par with what I've seen with drivers on any OS for any video card when playing games.
fast,
I dunno -- I guess I don't really have anything to benchmark them against, though I'd believe you if you told me that they were slower than the Windows drivers. They work without dropping frames in all of the 3d software that I have.
feature-filled
What features are you looking for?
I (using the open source DRI driver) xv support, have hardware OpenGL support, dualhead support, and can set gamma levels, which is pretty much as far as it goes for featureset that I use. There was a bug with texture compression that caused corrupted textures with NWN, and I flipped off texture compression as a result -- the feature was fixed in CVS a while back, but I haven't flipped it back on (just did so, though, now that you reminded me). I guess that I haven't tested it (and don't have NWN installed at the moment), so it's hard to say whether everything's kosher.
Face it, they're never going to be able to open their drivers unless the whole IP system is overhauled;
ATI? They are open.
NVidia -- maybe. I have a 9200 now and a G450 before that and a G200 before that -- both Matrox and ATI managed to have open source drivers. Well, technically Matrox put their hardware transform stuff in microcode that was uploaded by the dirver to the card, which was closed -- it's kinda hard to consider code running on the card part of the driver though -- and the open-source drivers didn't do the buffer-swapping tricks required for hardware accelerated 3d on the second head. As far as I can tell, it's really just NVidia that doesn't provide open source drivers. Maybe S3 does as well. Back when I owned an S3 card, 3d was pretty much a novelty, so I don't really know.
It's true that ATI's open source support lags their latest cards.
as it is right now, Mesa can't even come out and say that they're an OpenGL library.
Meh. There *are* things that I think are broken with IP (the patent system is very frusterating, though you can always just request a re-examination of stupid patents), but I don't have nearly as much a problem with trademarks. If SGI wants to have a standard called "OpenGL" that they get to certify things for, that's okay. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other.
If (at least chunks of it) were merged into the manstream kernel, people wouldn't have to keep manually dealing with breaks that other people introduce with kernel changes.
True, and yet it does make me depressed that nobody has proposed a stable, efficient system in which these (obviously significant) limitations of always being out to stab anyone in the back for more resources is present.
Another fine example of the open source business model.
Economics 101: Paying for something that your competitors get for free puts you at an economic disadvantage. Therefore, almost all companies will take open source software and not pay for it.
Traditionally, this situation (in game-theoretic terms, the public good problem) is solved by the imposition of government, which compells people to take the choice that, if individually made, would be disadvantageous, but if universally made, would be advantageous.
The US highway system is a good example. Nobody will buy 10' of road; it's useless. On the other hand, if everyone is forced to chip in enough money to fund 10' of roadway, everyone ends up winning.
Open Source is quite arguably more efficient than closed source development. I'd like to see governments recompense companies that use open source in one way or another.
I will never understand why many professional software developers are proponents of open source. Buy a big-rig truck and start delivering goods for free. See how many Teamsters rally round you and cheer you on. You'll be lucky if you just get your knees broken.
That's because with trucking you can't continue to supply demand without bound. There are N packages to be shipped a year; doing work for free means that another person doesn't get the job. With software development, on the other hand, if one niche is filled (suppose we got a really great world class word processor and all the people at Microsoft that work on Word and at Corel that work on WordPerfect lost their jobs), there's *always* another to fill. My car doesn't drive itself, my computer doesn't have human-like intelligence, and I can't snap a couple pictures with a cell phone of an arbitrary room and have the room reconstructed in 3d. Until computers do every single desireable thing in the world that computers could do, software developers will have work.
XFree86 has RENDER capabilities as well. In any event, these are toggleable.
Xcursor.core: true in your.Xresources will use the core cursor functionality rather than alternate alpha-blended cursors.
From the same guy that fucked up Xft.
Keith Packard *designed* Xft, so if you don't like his work, you don't like Xft. I think that few people would complain too much about Xft/fontconfig -- it provides significant functionality that the old X11 stuff didn't, including more advanced rendering, user-installable fonts, a font-selection system that doesn't scare regular users, etc.
ATI's drivers are most certainly NOT 'kicking the stuffing out of anything in the FOSS community'. Quite the opposite, in fact. And if you disagree with me, I will gladly swap my POS Radeon 9600 with anything that has an R2xx chip ( so I can use some real drivers ), or even a bloody nVidia.
I checked the DRI compatability list before buying my card and got a 9200, and it's been smooth sailing.:-) There were some texture compression artifacts in NWN (causing me to have to disable texture compression, which due to silly feature detection in NWN results in low-resolution-textures to be required).
* Most of the folks working on xorg worked on XFree86.
* Xorg has all the code and features of XFree86.
* XFree86 underwent a license change (and by virtue of the project leader getting to control the name, kept the name). The continuation of xorg under a GPL-compatible license *is* xorg.
The only real difference is that xorg has a more-accessable devel cycle.
And yes I realize both X's are from the same code base TODAY.. but that will slowly change over time as they go down different paths.
You *have* to be kidding. Open source suffers from PR damage by providing difference choices? By now, the closed source world would be *long* dead (well, perhaps not in the Microsoft world). Consider the following damaging and fragmenting choices (some may be out of date -- I haven't really followed closed source for a while):
* Quark, Pagemaker and InDesign
* Photoshop, PhotoPaint, Paintshop Pro
* Freehand, Illustrator, Corel Draw
* Word, WordPerfect
* Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express
* Maya, 3d Studio Max, Lightwave
* Norton Antivirus, McAfee
I don't agree that there is a significant PR problem with having choices available. I can think of almost no closed-source systems for which there is only one option available.
The viral structure of the GPL is intended to ensure that it stays alive -- otherwise, other software will feed off of GPLed software and kill the license.
We have all kinds of systems that would simply collapse if you removed what is apparently overhead. Yes, there are lots of "unnecessary" marketing people at software companies, but without those "unnecessary" people to take advantage of quirks in the way the human mind works, marketers at other companies would do so, and the company would die.
While there are some people that take issue with the GPL (and even a few that take issue with the LGPL), I have yet to see another plausible system for spreading open source.
Microsoft likes the BSD license. The BSD license is great and all, but it means that closed-source companies inherently have an edge, since open-source types must reverse-engineer anything done by closed-source companies, but closed-source companies can use whatever the latest-and-greatest open source stuff is. For some things, this is fine -- reference implementations and the like. However, if you believe that open source is really a better system (and I think that it is a difficult argument to say that it is not), I don't see why you'd argue against doing whatever helps people transition to it.
I also purchased an ATI Radeon 9200 for the sole reason that it was (a few months ago when I purchased it) the fastest 3d card well-supported by open source drivers.
I suspect that few people are interested in such a standard, but I hope that video card vendors will take note -- there are at least a few of us out there who value having open source drivers.
FC2 does not boot on some late-revision Asus P4P800SE boards (a very common board). Things just reboot after the grub screen.
There are patched CD images out there (since the install CD boots using said problematic kernel), and you can work around the problem on already-installed systems (if you upgraded by just using apt/yum) by using the SMP kernel instead of the uniprocessor one.
Slashdot Mirror
GNOME and KDE software (the stuff Windowsites are going to be using anyway) support Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V just fine.
The "no clipboard contents after app is closed" complaint isn't valid in the presence of the GNOME clipboard manager.
Really, I think I best heard the justification for the select/middle-click interface once -- the middle-click-pastes is *not* copy and paste. That's C-c and C-v. Middle-click-pastes is just a more evolved interface to drag-and-drop, which has extremely similar functionality.
The write support is only partial and extremely limited. You can overwrite files, but not resize them using the modern driver. The old driver *did* let you enable write mode, but it would trash ACL stuff, corrupting the filesystem for Windows use.
I remember when I used to think that people would be driven nuts by stupid, unnecessary animations all over their desktop. Well, *I* still am, but there are plenty of people that use Aqua.
Of course, Apple didn't put in "per keystroke sounds", so maybe it isn't as bad as one would think.
OTOH, Aqua+AIM with clicky keystroke mode enabled *is* equivalently annoying.
release early and often, Im certainly not going to use something that claims to be a "security" tool if I cant view the source to see for myself just how "secure" it is.
No, see, it's a private joke. The "Spinning Cube of Impending Doom" roots your network operations center, thus resulting in your doom.
I purchased my second new Saturn SL-series in 8/2002. I just had to take it in for a slipping clutch (at 29,900 which is unheard of as far as I am concerned). They offered me a rental car for free, service that would be finished the next day (probably because they were paying for the rental), and it was all under warranty. Now, like I said, it is unlikely that user error caused a slipping clutch at 30k but it is possible. No questions asked. Seems like they weren't trying to place the blame on the user here and just fixed the damn thing. I wonder if they didn't cover the first time or two and then told her to fuck off and started charging her for wasting their time?
You know, I've read numerous times and places that Saturns have really good service and support, but not being an auto nut, I had no idea whether it was just part of a big Saturn marketing effort.
FAT32 is anything but slow. It's probably at or near the top of the list of fastest filesystems. It's so simple, how could it not be?
s/FAT32/bubble sort/
I'm afraid that I can't agree with you.
"Simplicity" doesn't mean much from a computer science standpoint (Does little code need to run? Few disk accesses required?)
One reason why FAT32 is slow is that its space allocation data structure looks something like a linked list, whereas traditional *IX filesystems look like a tree. To seek to a random point in a file on FAT32 requires O(n) time where n is the filesize. To do the same on *IX filesystems requires O(log(n)) time. A linked list is a poor data structure for position-based seeking because it doesn't take significant advantage of the fact that blocks can be pre-ordered by position.
IIRC, the DDK is not freely available and redistributable (IMHO, a pretty awful thing for an OS vendor to do).
Also, writing Windows device drivers is -- how do I put this -- not very much *fun*. It's *hard*, extremely labor-intensive, there is not equivalent to Linux's "merge into the mainstream kernel" which means that people avoid breaking your code with their own feature additions, since Microsoft isn't going to take your code.
Finally, I can't think of all that many problems with NTFS. The main problem is that Linux can't read it -- but honestly, computers are so cheap these days (A friend just threw out a Duron 700 machine the other day) that it's easier to just have a Linux box and a Windows box than try dual-booting.
I guess hassling with removable drives is a bit of a pain in the ass.
Mmm...I dunno if I'd go that far.
Really, ext2, ext3, reiser, jfs, and xfs are all pretty much general-purpose filesystems. Yes, they all have particular areas in which they perform somewhat better than the others, but it's really not worth ripping your hair out over. I'd be more likely to choose something based on the few features that differentiate them (ext2 is forwards-compatible with ext3, or that reiser can optionally give up some speed to store small files more compactly).
If you are give code you don't have copyright to to a free project, what leverage do they have to ensure you were behaving well?
Oh. Oh, I see. I was thinking of the point of view of the copyright holder.
Yes, I see your point...but them I'm heavily swayed by the fact that I've yet to see deliberate code stealing by the open source world (there was the case where the Linux networking guys used BSD code without proper attribution -- it's okay to use code from BSD, but they weren't aware that they also had to attribute it, but that was accidental). There's mplayer's bundling of binary codecs (which pretty clearly violates EULAs) but that isn't anything that went into mplayer code, just stuff that you can install yourself that they pre-packaged for you. It's maintained separately from the mplayer codebase. There are a lot of companies that I can think of swiping open source code. On the other hand, in almost every closed source environment that I've been privy to, I've seen some degree of copyright infringement.
I'm sure that at some point, someone will steal code, just by the law of averages, but I'd be willing to say that open source projects are more likely to be legally clean than closed source projects.
Finally, I think that there's some reasonable psychology behind this. In CS classes, there's always going to be those people that don't want to write code and end up cheating, stealing code from other sources or people. These people aren't interested in doing things *right* or interested in the development itself or proud of what they've done -- they're just interested in getting the reward (their grade). In general, I've found that these sorts of people do not wind up doing open source projects (the volunteer open source types). Volunteer open source projects require people to derive a great deal of pride in their work or just like development, or else they wouldn't be out there producing code without being paid. The people who dislike writing code are largely not going to be part of this group.
Surely you would consider copyright infringement to be part of the law? It's more universal (no per-state exceptions as often affect employee contracts).
Are there any freely available Pak files that can be used as replacements to the originals?
There is a free reimplementation of the textures.
There is a free reimplementation of the audio effects.
It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be legal full "drop-in replacements" for the id pak files simply because the maps must be identical to interoperate (not just "kinda work similarly) and the maps are copyrighted by id and were never made free-as-in-beer.
It is entirely possible that people will just start using new (freely-available) maps, however. For example, the Team Fortress maps are freely redistributable.
I am not sure if there has been a project to fully reimplement the Q1 models (it'd be neat if someone did higher-poly-count versions).
If there is an unending supply of profitable niches to fill, why are so many software engineers unemployed?
Because there was just a huge shift in employment (outsourcing) and it takes the market a while to adjust.
OK, so neither are Free and Open
ATI has both closed and open drivers. I use exclusively the open ones (the ones that are part of DRI). I guess your definition of Free depends on your opinions on the matter, but I think that most people wouldn't have a problem with the MIT license that XFree86 (well, now called xorg) uses.
but at least one of them produces stable,
I play bzflag without problems, though I've had occasional hangs when playing NWN -- not common, though, and pretty much on par with what I've seen with drivers on any OS for any video card when playing games.
fast,
I dunno -- I guess I don't really have anything to benchmark them against, though I'd believe you if you told me that they were slower than the Windows drivers. They work without dropping frames in all of the 3d software that I have.
feature-filled
What features are you looking for?
I (using the open source DRI driver) xv support, have hardware OpenGL support, dualhead support, and can set gamma levels, which is pretty much as far as it goes for featureset that I use. There was a bug with texture compression that caused corrupted textures with NWN, and I flipped off texture compression as a result -- the feature was fixed in CVS a while back, but I haven't flipped it back on (just did so, though, now that you reminded me). I guess that I haven't tested it (and don't have NWN installed at the moment), so it's hard to say whether everything's kosher.
Face it, they're never going to be able to open their drivers unless the whole IP system is overhauled;
ATI? They are open.
NVidia -- maybe. I have a 9200 now and a G450 before that and a G200 before that -- both Matrox and ATI managed to have open source drivers. Well, technically Matrox put their hardware transform stuff in microcode that was uploaded by the dirver to the card, which was closed -- it's kinda hard to consider code running on the card part of the driver though -- and the open-source drivers didn't do the buffer-swapping tricks required for hardware accelerated 3d on the second head. As far as I can tell, it's really just NVidia that doesn't provide open source drivers. Maybe S3 does as well. Back when I owned an S3 card, 3d was pretty much a novelty, so I don't really know.
It's true that ATI's open source support lags their latest cards.
as it is right now, Mesa can't even come out and say that they're an OpenGL library.
Meh. There *are* things that I think are broken with IP (the patent system is very frusterating, though you can always just request a re-examination of stupid patents), but I don't have nearly as much a problem with trademarks. If SGI wants to have a standard called "OpenGL" that they get to certify things for, that's okay. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other.
If (at least chunks of it) were merged into the manstream kernel, people wouldn't have to keep manually dealing with breaks that other people introduce with kernel changes.
Restricted /proc was particularly nice, as the mainstream kernel is still missing it.
True, and yet it does make me depressed that nobody has proposed a stable, efficient system in which these (obviously significant) limitations of always being out to stab anyone in the back for more resources is present.
Another fine example of the open source business model.
Economics 101: Paying for something that your competitors get for free puts you at an economic disadvantage. Therefore, almost all companies will take open source software and not pay for it.
Traditionally, this situation (in game-theoretic terms, the public good problem) is solved by the imposition of government, which compells people to take the choice that, if individually made, would be disadvantageous, but if universally made, would be advantageous.
The US highway system is a good example. Nobody will buy 10' of road; it's useless. On the other hand, if everyone is forced to chip in enough money to fund 10' of roadway, everyone ends up winning.
Open Source is quite arguably more efficient than closed source development. I'd like to see governments recompense companies that use open source in one way or another.
I will never understand why many professional software developers are proponents of open source. Buy a big-rig truck and start delivering goods for free. See how many Teamsters rally round you and cheer you on. You'll be lucky if you just get your knees broken.
That's because with trucking you can't continue to supply demand without bound. There are N packages to be shipped a year; doing work for free means that another person doesn't get the job. With software development, on the other hand, if one niche is filled (suppose we got a really great world class word processor and all the people at Microsoft that work on Word and at Corel that work on WordPerfect lost their jobs), there's *always* another to fill. My car doesn't drive itself, my computer doesn't have human-like intelligence, and I can't snap a couple pictures with a cell phone of an arbitrary room and have the room reconstructed in 3d. Until computers do every single desireable thing in the world that computers could do, software developers will have work.
X.org has lame little dropshadows everywhere.
.Xresources will use the core cursor functionality rather than alternate alpha-blended cursors.
XFree86 has RENDER capabilities as well. In any event, these are toggleable.
Xcursor.core: true in your
From the same guy that fucked up Xft.
Keith Packard *designed* Xft, so if you don't like his work, you don't like Xft. I think that few people would complain too much about Xft/fontconfig -- it provides significant functionality that the old X11 stuff didn't, including more advanced rendering, user-installable fonts, a font-selection system that doesn't scare regular users, etc.
ATI's drivers are most certainly NOT 'kicking the stuffing out of anything in the FOSS community'. Quite the opposite, in fact. And if you disagree with me, I will gladly swap my POS Radeon 9600 with anything that has an R2xx chip ( so I can use some real drivers ), or even a bloody nVidia.
:-) There were some texture compression artifacts in NWN (causing me to have to disable texture compression, which due to silly feature detection in NWN results in low-resolution-textures to be required).
I checked the DRI compatability list before buying my card and got a 9200, and it's been smooth sailing.
You *do* realize that:
* Most of the folks working on xorg worked on XFree86.
* Xorg has all the code and features of XFree86.
* XFree86 underwent a license change (and by virtue of the project leader getting to control the name, kept the name). The continuation of xorg under a GPL-compatible license *is* xorg.
The only real difference is that xorg has a more-accessable devel cycle.
Frankly this is off topic but I just wish that ATI could just put more heart into their drivers like Nvidia does.
I have no idea what you're talking about. When Nvidia even has has an open-source driver, there might be some argument.
And yes I realize both X's are from the same code base TODAY.. but that will slowly change over time as they go down different paths.
You *have* to be kidding. Open source suffers from PR damage by providing difference choices? By now, the closed source world would be *long* dead (well, perhaps not in the Microsoft world). Consider the following damaging and fragmenting choices (some may be out of date -- I haven't really followed closed source for a while):
* Quark, Pagemaker and InDesign
* Photoshop, PhotoPaint, Paintshop Pro
* Freehand, Illustrator, Corel Draw
* Word, WordPerfect
* Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Outlook, Outlook Express
* Maya, 3d Studio Max, Lightwave
* Norton Antivirus, McAfee
I don't agree that there is a significant PR problem with having choices available. I can think of almost no closed-source systems for which there is only one option available.
Not entirely.
The viral structure of the GPL is intended to ensure that it stays alive -- otherwise, other software will feed off of GPLed software and kill the license.
We have all kinds of systems that would simply collapse if you removed what is apparently overhead. Yes, there are lots of "unnecessary" marketing people at software companies, but without those "unnecessary" people to take advantage of quirks in the way the human mind works, marketers at other companies would do so, and the company would die.
While there are some people that take issue with the GPL (and even a few that take issue with the LGPL), I have yet to see another plausible system for spreading open source.
Microsoft likes the BSD license. The BSD license is great and all, but it means that closed-source companies inherently have an edge, since open-source types must reverse-engineer anything done by closed-source companies, but closed-source companies can use whatever the latest-and-greatest open source stuff is. For some things, this is fine -- reference implementations and the like. However, if you believe that open source is really a better system (and I think that it is a difficult argument to say that it is not), I don't see why you'd argue against doing whatever helps people transition to it.
I also purchased an ATI Radeon 9200 for the sole reason that it was (a few months ago when I purchased it) the fastest 3d card well-supported by open source drivers.
I suspect that few people are interested in such a standard, but I hope that video card vendors will take note -- there are at least a few of us out there who value having open source drivers.
FC2 does not boot on some late-revision Asus P4P800SE boards (a very common board). Things just reboot after the grub screen.
There are patched CD images out there (since the install CD boots using said problematic kernel), and you can work around the problem on already-installed systems (if you upgraded by just using apt/yum) by using the SMP kernel instead of the uniprocessor one.