Red Hat release a new version every 6 months...usually April and October. Every year it's been like this. So...don't grab the latest release in September either.:)
Well, there were 20 prereleases. And Alan's diarydid note that he had sent a 2.2.15 to Linus. And there was already a 16pre1 out there. A bit more checking and you wouldn't have had this problem. Oh well, it's fun anyway, right?:)
Who cares what zdnet thinks? Or anyone else, for that matter? Good press, bad press, what's the fuss? Life goes on.
I submit that mainstream press articles - positive or negative - containing no new or useful information need not be reported here any longer. They are, in effect, simply meta-trolls. We've heard it all before, and none of it makes any difference.
Boycotting Nvidia is a pretty symbolic gesture, but financially pointless.
However, unless we are copyright holders for infringed code, it is our strongest weapon. If nVidia really is a proper corporation acting in their stockholders' best interests, then that weapon will be effective if applied in sufficient measure. I don't think they're willing to lose 50% of their business. What about 20%? 10%? 1%? In a boycott, time will tell whether enough people are participating. It depends on the margins, the market shares, and the amounts of money involved.
Another, more interesting, idea might be to boycott all of nVidia's business partners and stockholders. A meta-boycott, as it were. Nothing like a kick in the ass from an important business partner.
Five years ago I agreed. Maybe even two. But friendly dialogue and good faith efforts to protect our rights are not bearing fruit. The number of violations is quite clearly increasing, not decreasing. And as open source systems, Linux especially, grow in popularity the opportunities become greater in number and attractiveness. Something must be done. The enemy have unwittingly given us powerful weapons they intended to use against us. So let's use those weapons. If nothing else they will think twice before pushing the next DMCA.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Such a case would be exceedingly weak at best. They have not violated any contract with me; the contract I would have would be their own license, which they could not possibly violate. The licensors must sue. It is their copyright which is being infringed, their license which is being breached. Much as an arbitrary individual (or the ACLU, for a more concrete example) cannot simply walk into District Court and file for an injunction against whatever recent ballot initiative happens to have offended him. No, the plaintiff must be an interested party. The law is, on that at least, quite clear.
eg, you think the material is in the public domain
This is not what they're claiming. In fact, there is no way they could have in good faith failed to realize the copyright on the code. You don't see a lot of companies making mistakes wherein they accidentally release proprietary code under license to them. So why are there so many "mistakes" wherein GPL'd code finds its way into proprietary code? I would argue that anyone operating in good faith would never allow GPL'd code to be so much as seen by their developers. I mean, really, is the giant 30-line copyright notice at the top of every file that easy to miss?
you can be ordered to stop... exactly what nVidia is already doing
In 5 years when they have to put food on the table for there 6 mildly retarted kids and strung out wife while trying to find a way to run a T1 line into the trailer park, they'll take a part-time job writing closed-source encryption apps for the local drug dealer to make ends meet.
Ah, the "life sucks and then you die" philosophy. Too bad I don't buy into that. I'll not mock the example, since it's certainly possible for some, but I will say that I seem to be supporting myself just fine without selling out. It's all about priorities. I have mine, you have yours. That they differ does not give you the right to insist that mine are somehow juvenile or inferior.
At issue here is the essence of liberty. The individual you mention has lost his liberty, not to nVidia, or to Microsoft, but to himself. He has thrown it away for something he presumably values more. I value nothing more, and will not have my liberty stripped from me nor will I throw it away for anything. He acts on his values, I on mine.
As an aside, I highly doubt the local drug dealer cares whether or not his applications are open source. His encryption keys, however...
Jaded, Hell. We're not children (most of us anyway). We can see for ourselves how their world works. Until we can make our own we're forced to play in theirs. That given, this is simply reality. Corporations are easily dealt with when you remember that they're just after money. That's actually a good thing; it clarifies situations like this one. nVidia thinks they can steal from us. And why not, from their viewpoint? There's so much effort being made not to look like zealots that they know they'll get away with it, even if they're caught. So why not; hey, it's good for profits. And the only way to stop it is to make it BAD for profits. Simple enough. A no-limit game, if you've the stomach for it. We're showing that we don't; it's all too clear that they do.
How about showing them our way of life and SW development, and see if they don't come around eventually?
It's been 16 years. How long shall we wait?
We share. In good spirit.
We do. And they don't. And don't. And don't. And don't. And don't. And don't. At what point do attempts at peaceful coexistence become self-immolation? Enough is enough. They benefit from our efforts, even if it means violating the law, and yet we sit idly by while they give back nothing. They seem to like their set of rules. So let's play by them. The devil can cite scripture, to his end.
We're seeing more and more of this today. Why? Simple: it's hard to catch this, and we let them off when it is caught. The right way to handle this is to tell them that they can either release the module under the GPL, immediately, or go to court. Until someone does that, more and more people are going to take, take, take GPL'd code and use it for their proprietary binary-only projects, knowing full well that, much like an individual who shoplifts in the US, he won't likely be caught, and if he is the consequences will be negligible.
THIS MUST STOP. I guarantee you nVidia will NOT just ask you kindly to stop if you (for example) violate their license by reverse-engineering their software. Hell, no. Instead, you'll have a hundred letters from big-time lawyers in your mailbox, your ISP will be court-ordered to shut off your site(s), and if you're lucky you'll only be paying them off for the next 40 years after you lose in court.
We should be making it at least as painful for them. Threaten, sue, and threaten some more. They won't learn any other way. Our licenses are not negotiable. You want the DMCA? Well, then, IT GOES FOR US TOO. Follow the license or go to jail. Where were the copyright police today? They didn't have any trouble rousting out a 13-year-old kid IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY no less or fucking over mp3.com, so where were they for this equal offense?
The GPL is every bit as binding, every bit as legal, and every bit as serious a license as any other. It's time we got tough about this. They're playing hardball, we're striking out one after another, and then when they're up to bat we give them intentional walks, one after another.
I hope to God I come up with something nVidia sees fit to use in their software. Because I have balls, resources, and a good mind to fuck them to Hell and back. It's long past time for this one-way street to come to an end.
Re:who says it will be bought out by Turner
on
Who Owns Dmoz?
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YES! This is in the License FAQ. Please read it. If the original poster had, this discussion would not even be taking place.
Hmmm...define recent. I've built M14 and M15 as well as a number of more recent ones from CVS and they seem ok. Not great, but they certainly run. You can get my M14 build here if it helps you. I'll put an M15 up there too soon.
And what exactly do you suggest? Writing letters, which will be ignored? Protesting in the streets so they can lock us up or run over us with tanks? Voting for different politicians, which all become the same once in office? There's no stopping the system. You can try, but you can't succeed. The only solution is to destroy the system. As long as the power rests where it currently does, there is no way constant vigilance and alertness will help; the time for that is long past.
There's a theory of economics which holds that prolonged periods of peace and stability serve to entrench special interests in positions of power, and that regulatory efforts intended to prevent this are "captured" by the very interests they are supposed to oversee. It happens. It's happened here. The only way it will be stopped is by a mass uprising, which will inevitably be violent and bloody. Power is rarely given up voluntarily. The only interesting part left is trying to predict exactly when and where it will start.
to do what the government-megacorporation alliance tells you to do. Really, in the US you have no rights whatsoever, which fact is becoming more and more obvious as blatantly immoral - and probably illegal - legislation like the DMCA and UCITA are being passed by people who ought to know that they aren't accurately representing their constituents. And everybody knows this. For that matter, everybody knows you have no rights anywhere else either. All that's left is to sit back and wait for the revolution. Here's to hoping that what we get out of it will be better than what we've got now.
I see your point, but I've installed a lot of software, under virtually every model of distribution (it is my job, after all). I find that by far the most difficult and complicated packages to install have been binary-only proprietary distributions. Even a source package that doesn't compile out of the box is usually easier to get right. That doesn't mean, of course, that it's impossible to get binary-only distribution right - netscape is pretty decent for example - but it doesn't seem too common.
Obviously anybody who's actually going to sell software and expect people to buy it is going to be providing documentation on how to properly install it. This is true regardless of what format the package is distributed in. Maybe the real problem here is that the installation documentation isn't very good. If the package doesn't build, that's one thing - I don't necessarily expect everyone to have the experience necessary to fix it; so call tech support. But normally, we have to assume that the vendor tested first on at least a few common systems, so if you don't think you can deal with fixing it up, you'll just have to use one of those platforms. It's still no worse than binary-only distribution.
You think PPC is tough, try SPARC some time. SPARC is the #2 Linux platform, but nobody seems to give a damn about it. And I'm not just talking about the proprietary vendors either. If it's not Open Source, forget it. If it is Open Source, there's a good chance, but still no guarantee.
Of course, if you read my other post, it's clear that this problem also has a simple solution.
The problem they are trying to address could easily be solved by eliminating binary-only software distribution. Now before you get your undies in a bundle and call me an open source fanatic, I'm not necessarily suggesting that everything must be Open Sourced. Instead, a vendor wishing to distribute software on Unix (and/or Linux) simply does so by shipping source under a no-redistribute license. That way, the customer can build/rebuild/port the software to whatever platform(s) they wish without worrying about library and kernel upgrades. We have a major package licensed under these terms where I work and I'm thrilled that the vendor chose to go that route, because I'm the one who has to maintain it. If it were binary-only it would be a nightmare. Instead, a major OS upgrade just includes a rebuild for this package, and if someone wants to put it on a completely different system, it's no problem.
Nice and simple. Vendor gets to protect their IP and sell licenses, the lawyers are kept happy, and the customers get the flexibility they need. Infinitely better than binary-only. The only catch is testing, but it's not really too hard to catch the common cases, and specify minimum versions of the relevant compilers, libraries, etc. (which would also have to be done with binary-only, except that this can be much more flexible, since source compatibility is generally much easier to keep across library versions than binary compatibility).
This is the way proprietary software used to be distributed, in the times before microsoft. It was a good idea, one I'd like to see return. Much easier than getting everyone to agree on something like Open86 or LSB. Besides, especially in the Linux world, trying to make libraries and such a rigid specification just harms users, especially those who don't care about proprietary software. Let the distribution managers have the freedom to do what they want...
Gee, SILO has been able to boot past 1024 cylinders for ages now. It also doesn't have to be run on new kernel images, understands ext2 and iso9660 filesystems, and even has some simple functionaly like the ability to ls some directory to see what you want to boot. In addition to Linux it can also boot SunOS and Solaris, and has been ported to PowerPC for use on Apple's Open Firmware systems. Very nice. Of course, the catch is that you'll need a system with enough intelligence in its firmware to know what it is. The peecee BIOS is too braindead for something nice like this. Though the possibility might exist of writing a bootloader for peecees that included an OF emulator. But then, why bother; writing real-mode 16-bit x86 code isn't my idea of fun, and I doubt it's yours either.
LinuxPPC and BeOS? I've never seen a Microsoft operating system that runs on Mac hardware.
Me neither, though there may have been one at some point. The point I'm making here is that Apple is competing with microsoft because most people think they'll end up using one or the other. Therefore the decision most people think of is 'apple or microsoft.' So what if Apple happens to ship their hardware and software together? They still compete with microsoft for users.
On the other hand, if Linux lacks hardware support because the
Linux community can't accept one ounce of close source then you shouldn't complain to anyone - you made your bed so sleep in it.
I don't. Instead I buy the hardware that's supported by specs or source-available drivers. In other words, instead of whining about the problem I vote with my dollars and actually do something about it. The fact that you want to throw away twenty years worth of others' efforts just so you can have your binary-only shitware drivers for hardware you shouldn't have bought in the first place doesn't mean I should have to pay the price for it.
Why is it that most kernel changes are tested first on PC hardware and then on other hardware?
Perhaps you simply aren't following the non-peecee development efforts. Changes are made to the architecture-independent portions take time to propagate through to the architecture-dependent code they affect. Linus happens to work on peecees, so he puts in his own changes right away. The other maintainers put their changes into their own trees right away as well, but if you only use the stock kernels you don't see that right away. That doesn't mean the other architectures receive any less attention, just that Linus delays putting in the applicable patches.
Perhaps you should read more source code?
Well, considering that I've been following the development series since 1.3 and reading more or less every patch, and l-k, and sparclinux, I'm not really sure what else you think I should be reading. Perhaps the nVidia marketing drivel that serves as the source of your information?
There really isn't any reason to trust most commercial vendors, especially publicly-owned companies. This is just a part of capitalism.
Don't kid yourself, Corporate America doesn't have your best interests at heart.
At least, I hope they don't. There's nothing worse than someone who does something he believes to be for your own good. I actually like a corporation that doesn't try to do anything but make a profit. I can deal with that, very easily, with my own economic weaponry. If I don't like the company I don't buy the product. If I really don't like the company, I encourage boycotts. Much simpler than litigation, government regulation, and so forth. Too bad most consumers haven't the stomach for it and would rather take the easy way out and demand that corporations have a social conscience. In this instance, nVidia should want to make its documentation open so that I will consider buying from them, not because a bunch of people whine about the evils of intellectual property. If the motivation to make a sale is insufficient for them, they are free to keep their secrets. I just won't buy from them, and I'll encourage others to do the same. It's nVidia's prerogative to be stupid...
That's crap and you know it. Either closed source is a viable model or it isn't. You can't have it both ways just to exclude certain
companies from your ire.
It is viable. But what you haven't grasped is that in a closed-source model there must be some motivation for the vendor to provide quality. In a commodity market heavily influenced by microsoft there is no such motivation. Hence the closed-source software that gets produced is crap. If you want to talk about things being a totally different market, I'd say the same about million-dollar systems. It's a whole new ball game at that level, and source availability isn't a prerequisite for quality.
How do you define the Macintosh also? It has every bit as close a tie between software and hardware
that any commercial unix has.
It's a commodity product. Having close ties to the hardware just makes it easier to write quality software, it doesn't make any guarantee. Apple chooses to provide poor quality software because they can. Look who they're competing with...
I'm also well aware that Linux is far more accepted than The Hurd and probably always will be because it was
written by someone who cared about results and not their own personal theology.
Linux is more accepted than the Hurd for several reasons. First to market, faster, not based on a platform (Mach) that has never really had any success, not fucking vapourware,... Why it was written is irrelevant.
Remember, every person that uses Windows is one less person that is going to convince nVidia to care about Linux in the long term.
I don't want nVidia to care about Linux. I want them to do The Right Thing and let people have the damn programmer's manuals for their chips. Linux hasn't a thing to do with it.
Most people I know who
think rationally and not religiously about systems would happily use a closed source driver to encourage support for the system.
You can think what you like, I suppose. But when you turn around and realize that Linux has become a joke as a Free system don't complain to me. The price of liberty and all that...
Perhaps you should stop using Linux if you want to support non-peecee stuff?
Heh. I run Linux on seven systems. Only two are peecees. Quite frankly, Linux on peecees is subpar, mostly because the hardware sucks so badly. Linux on Suns, however, is very nice, much better than Solaris and probably even better than IRIX on SGIs. Wouldn't trade it for anything. Linux is orthogonal to the peecee; anyone who tells you otherwise has been reading too much marketing hype and not enough source code. Besides, what else would I use? BSD? Already do. Solaris? Sun need to get the message that Solaris is crap. IRIX? It only runs on SGIs, and I'm already using it there. Really, what's your rationale here? I use what works, with preference given to systems for which I can obtain the source. Linux doesn't run on my SGI Power Challenge, so I don't use it there. It does run on my Suns, and it's better than Solaris, so I do. Where in that thought process is the fanaticism you keep claiming?
If every hardware vendor offers drivers under the same license, your
once-stable unix-like operating system has become the hell that is AIX and S/390.
You don't get it. I don't hate the commercial unices. Why? Simple - the hardware and software people work together from day one. They sell a few thousand systems at a million bucks a pop to people who, when faced with two minutes a year of downtime, will tell you to go fuck yourself and do business with your competitor. Name one good reason nVidia cares about the stability of its drivers, for any OS. They don't, and by reasonable business practices, they shouldn't. Gamers, their primary if not only market, don't care about occasional crashes. After all, most of them have used winbloze for so long they're accustomed to it. So what if their Linux drivers do the same? Bringing in IBM (or Sun or SGI or $OTHER_CLOSED_SOURCE_UNIX_VENDOR) is ridiculous. Closed source is only really destructive in a commodity market.
So by your estimation, no drivers is better than some drivers.
If the "some" are binary-only for commodity hardware on an open-source OS, yes.
and I thought it was because Linus didn't like Minix or DOS and so he
wrote a Unix that he did like.
The GNU project was 8+ years old when Linus started working... How do you think he compiled Linux? With the SunOS compiler? The history of Free Software doesn't begin with Red Hat Linux 4.0, despite what you've been told.
Do you honestly prefer that people use
Windows to Linux? Are you sure you aren't really a Microsoft plant?
If it means that vendors will be more likely in the future to provide true support, ie specs, then yes I would rather people use windoze than binary-only drivers under $OPEN_SOURCE_OS. I've never worked for Microsoft or any subsidiary thereof. I refuse even to use their products. If I'm somehow a "plant" because I believe Free Software is a goal worth striving for at the occasional expense of immediate convenience, then I guess I'm a plant.
Aren't nVidia and SGI sharing technology at the moment?
Apparently, though the exact details seem something of a mystery. What I'd much rather see than some crappy binary-only Linux-only drivers for the commodity GeForce is a nice 64xGeForce2 device I could put in my SGI, and a quality IRIX driver for it. But then, SGI has been deluded into thinking peecees are viable technology. Let's see, that leaves...exactly one vendor who hasn't made a peecee yet - Tera/Cray. I think I'll look into their products. Somebody's got to support the non-peecee people while it's still possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat release a new version every 6 months...usually April and October. Every year it's been like this. So...don't grab the latest release in September either. :)
Well, there were 20 prereleases. And Alan's diary did note that he had sent a 2.2.15 to Linus. And there was already a 16pre1 out there. A bit more checking and you wouldn't have had this problem. Oh well, it's fun anyway, right? :)
I submit that mainstream press articles - positive or negative - containing no new or useful information need not be reported here any longer. They are, in effect, simply meta-trolls. We've heard it all before, and none of it makes any difference.
Take two Valium and send me email tomorrow.
However, unless we are copyright holders for infringed code, it is our strongest weapon. If nVidia really is a proper corporation acting in their stockholders' best interests, then that weapon will be effective if applied in sufficient measure. I don't think they're willing to lose 50% of their business. What about 20%? 10%? 1%? In a boycott, time will tell whether enough people are participating. It depends on the margins, the market shares, and the amounts of money involved.
Another, more interesting, idea might be to boycott all of nVidia's business partners and stockholders. A meta-boycott, as it were. Nothing like a kick in the ass from an important business partner.
I think replies to this comment properly belong under the RMS interview. I doubt I can put it any better than he does.
Five years ago I agreed. Maybe even two. But friendly dialogue and good faith efforts to protect our rights are not bearing fruit. The number of violations is quite clearly increasing, not decreasing. And as open source systems, Linux especially, grow in popularity the opportunities become greater in number and attractiveness. Something must be done. The enemy have unwittingly given us powerful weapons they intended to use against us. So let's use those weapons. If nothing else they will think twice before pushing the next DMCA.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Such a case would be exceedingly weak at best. They have not violated any contract with me; the contract I would have would be their own license, which they could not possibly violate. The licensors must sue. It is their copyright which is being infringed, their license which is being breached. Much as an arbitrary individual (or the ACLU, for a more concrete example) cannot simply walk into District Court and file for an injunction against whatever recent ballot initiative happens to have offended him. No, the plaintiff must be an interested party. The law is, on that at least, quite clear.
This is not what they're claiming. In fact, there is no way they could have in good faith failed to realize the copyright on the code. You don't see a lot of companies making mistakes wherein they accidentally release proprietary code under license to them. So why are there so many "mistakes" wherein GPL'd code finds its way into proprietary code? I would argue that anyone operating in good faith would never allow GPL'd code to be so much as seen by their developers. I mean, really, is the giant 30-line copyright notice at the top of every file that easy to miss?
you can be ordered to stop ... exactly what nVidia is already doing
On their timetable it would seem.
Ah, the "life sucks and then you die" philosophy. Too bad I don't buy into that. I'll not mock the example, since it's certainly possible for some, but I will say that I seem to be supporting myself just fine without selling out. It's all about priorities. I have mine, you have yours. That they differ does not give you the right to insist that mine are somehow juvenile or inferior.
At issue here is the essence of liberty. The individual you mention has lost his liberty, not to nVidia, or to Microsoft, but to himself. He has thrown it away for something he presumably values more. I value nothing more, and will not have my liberty stripped from me nor will I throw it away for anything. He acts on his values, I on mine.
As an aside, I highly doubt the local drug dealer cares whether or not his applications are open source. His encryption keys, however...
Jaded, Hell. We're not children (most of us anyway). We can see for ourselves how their world works. Until we can make our own we're forced to play in theirs. That given, this is simply reality. Corporations are easily dealt with when you remember that they're just after money. That's actually a good thing; it clarifies situations like this one. nVidia thinks they can steal from us. And why not, from their viewpoint? There's so much effort being made not to look like zealots that they know they'll get away with it, even if they're caught. So why not; hey, it's good for profits. And the only way to stop it is to make it BAD for profits. Simple enough. A no-limit game, if you've the stomach for it. We're showing that we don't; it's all too clear that they do.
It's been 16 years. How long shall we wait?
We share. In good spirit.
We do. And they don't. And don't. And don't. And don't. And don't. And don't. At what point do attempts at peaceful coexistence become self-immolation? Enough is enough. They benefit from our efforts, even if it means violating the law, and yet we sit idly by while they give back nothing. They seem to like their set of rules. So let's play by them. The devil can cite scripture, to his end.
THIS MUST STOP. I guarantee you nVidia will NOT just ask you kindly to stop if you (for example) violate their license by reverse-engineering their software. Hell, no. Instead, you'll have a hundred letters from big-time lawyers in your mailbox, your ISP will be court-ordered to shut off your site(s), and if you're lucky you'll only be paying them off for the next 40 years after you lose in court.
We should be making it at least as painful for them. Threaten, sue, and threaten some more. They won't learn any other way. Our licenses are not negotiable. You want the DMCA? Well, then, IT GOES FOR US TOO. Follow the license or go to jail. Where were the copyright police today? They didn't have any trouble rousting out a 13-year-old kid IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY no less or fucking over mp3.com, so where were they for this equal offense?
The GPL is every bit as binding, every bit as legal, and every bit as serious a license as any other. It's time we got tough about this. They're playing hardball, we're striking out one after another, and then when they're up to bat we give them intentional walks, one after another.
I hope to God I come up with something nVidia sees fit to use in their software. Because I have balls, resources, and a good mind to fuck them to Hell and back. It's long past time for this one-way street to come to an end.
YES! This is in the License FAQ. Please read it. If the original poster had, this discussion would not even be taking place.
Enough to buy and shut down Microsoft. :) So about a trillion...a mean, 800 billion, no whoops, 600 billion dollars.
Hmmm...define recent. I've built M14 and M15 as well as a number of more recent ones from CVS and they seem ok. Not great, but they certainly run. You can get my M14 build here if it helps you. I'll put an M15 up there too soon.
There's a theory of economics which holds that prolonged periods of peace and stability serve to entrench special interests in positions of power, and that regulatory efforts intended to prevent this are "captured" by the very interests they are supposed to oversee. It happens. It's happened here. The only way it will be stopped is by a mass uprising, which will inevitably be violent and bloody. Power is rarely given up voluntarily. The only interesting part left is trying to predict exactly when and where it will start.
And then the process starts over...
to do what the government-megacorporation alliance tells you to do. Really, in the US you have no rights whatsoever, which fact is becoming more and more obvious as blatantly immoral - and probably illegal - legislation like the DMCA and UCITA are being passed by people who ought to know that they aren't accurately representing their constituents. And everybody knows this. For that matter, everybody knows you have no rights anywhere else either. All that's left is to sit back and wait for the revolution. Here's to hoping that what we get out of it will be better than what we've got now.
Obviously anybody who's actually going to sell software and expect people to buy it is going to be providing documentation on how to properly install it. This is true regardless of what format the package is distributed in. Maybe the real problem here is that the installation documentation isn't very good. If the package doesn't build, that's one thing - I don't necessarily expect everyone to have the experience necessary to fix it; so call tech support. But normally, we have to assume that the vendor tested first on at least a few common systems, so if you don't think you can deal with fixing it up, you'll just have to use one of those platforms. It's still no worse than binary-only distribution.
Of course, if you read my other post, it's clear that this problem also has a simple solution.
Nice and simple. Vendor gets to protect their IP and sell licenses, the lawyers are kept happy, and the customers get the flexibility they need. Infinitely better than binary-only. The only catch is testing, but it's not really too hard to catch the common cases, and specify minimum versions of the relevant compilers, libraries, etc. (which would also have to be done with binary-only, except that this can be much more flexible, since source compatibility is generally much easier to keep across library versions than binary compatibility).
This is the way proprietary software used to be distributed, in the times before microsoft. It was a good idea, one I'd like to see return. Much easier than getting everyone to agree on something like Open86 or LSB. Besides, especially in the Linux world, trying to make libraries and such a rigid specification just harms users, especially those who don't care about proprietary software. Let the distribution managers have the freedom to do what they want...
Gee, SILO has been able to boot past 1024 cylinders for ages now. It also doesn't have to be run on new kernel images, understands ext2 and iso9660 filesystems, and even has some simple functionaly like the ability to ls some directory to see what you want to boot. In addition to Linux it can also boot SunOS and Solaris, and has been ported to PowerPC for use on Apple's Open Firmware systems. Very nice. Of course, the catch is that you'll need a system with enough intelligence in its firmware to know what it is. The peecee BIOS is too braindead for something nice like this. Though the possibility might exist of writing a bootloader for peecees that included an OF emulator. But then, why bother; writing real-mode 16-bit x86 code isn't my idea of fun, and I doubt it's yours either.
Me neither, though there may have been one at some point. The point I'm making here is that Apple is competing with microsoft because most people think they'll end up using one or the other. Therefore the decision most people think of is 'apple or microsoft.' So what if Apple happens to ship their hardware and software together? They still compete with microsoft for users.
On the other hand, if Linux lacks hardware support because the Linux community can't accept one ounce of close source then you shouldn't complain to anyone - you made your bed so sleep in it.
I don't. Instead I buy the hardware that's supported by specs or source-available drivers. In other words, instead of whining about the problem I vote with my dollars and actually do something about it. The fact that you want to throw away twenty years worth of others' efforts just so you can have your binary-only shitware drivers for hardware you shouldn't have bought in the first place doesn't mean I should have to pay the price for it.
Why is it that most kernel changes are tested first on PC hardware and then on other hardware?
Perhaps you simply aren't following the non-peecee development efforts. Changes are made to the architecture-independent portions take time to propagate through to the architecture-dependent code they affect. Linus happens to work on peecees, so he puts in his own changes right away. The other maintainers put their changes into their own trees right away as well, but if you only use the stock kernels you don't see that right away. That doesn't mean the other architectures receive any less attention, just that Linus delays putting in the applicable patches.
Perhaps you should read more source code?
Well, considering that I've been following the development series since 1.3 and reading more or less every patch, and l-k, and sparclinux, I'm not really sure what else you think I should be reading. Perhaps the nVidia marketing drivel that serves as the source of your information?
At least, I hope they don't. There's nothing worse than someone who does something he believes to be for your own good. I actually like a corporation that doesn't try to do anything but make a profit. I can deal with that, very easily, with my own economic weaponry. If I don't like the company I don't buy the product. If I really don't like the company, I encourage boycotts. Much simpler than litigation, government regulation, and so forth. Too bad most consumers haven't the stomach for it and would rather take the easy way out and demand that corporations have a social conscience. In this instance, nVidia should want to make its documentation open so that I will consider buying from them, not because a bunch of people whine about the evils of intellectual property. If the motivation to make a sale is insufficient for them, they are free to keep their secrets. I just won't buy from them, and I'll encourage others to do the same. It's nVidia's prerogative to be stupid...
It is viable. But what you haven't grasped is that in a closed-source model there must be some motivation for the vendor to provide quality. In a commodity market heavily influenced by microsoft there is no such motivation. Hence the closed-source software that gets produced is crap. If you want to talk about things being a totally different market, I'd say the same about million-dollar systems. It's a whole new ball game at that level, and source availability isn't a prerequisite for quality.
How do you define the Macintosh also? It has every bit as close a tie between software and hardware that any commercial unix has.
It's a commodity product. Having close ties to the hardware just makes it easier to write quality software, it doesn't make any guarantee. Apple chooses to provide poor quality software because they can. Look who they're competing with...
I'm also well aware that Linux is far more accepted than The Hurd and probably always will be because it was written by someone who cared about results and not their own personal theology.
Linux is more accepted than the Hurd for several reasons. First to market, faster, not based on a platform (Mach) that has never really had any success, not fucking vapourware, ... Why it was written is irrelevant.
Remember, every person that uses Windows is one less person that is going to convince nVidia to care about Linux in the long term.
I don't want nVidia to care about Linux. I want them to do The Right Thing and let people have the damn programmer's manuals for their chips. Linux hasn't a thing to do with it.
Most people I know who think rationally and not religiously about systems would happily use a closed source driver to encourage support for the system.
You can think what you like, I suppose. But when you turn around and realize that Linux has become a joke as a Free system don't complain to me. The price of liberty and all that...
Perhaps you should stop using Linux if you want to support non-peecee stuff?
Heh. I run Linux on seven systems. Only two are peecees. Quite frankly, Linux on peecees is subpar, mostly because the hardware sucks so badly. Linux on Suns, however, is very nice, much better than Solaris and probably even better than IRIX on SGIs. Wouldn't trade it for anything. Linux is orthogonal to the peecee; anyone who tells you otherwise has been reading too much marketing hype and not enough source code. Besides, what else would I use? BSD? Already do. Solaris? Sun need to get the message that Solaris is crap. IRIX? It only runs on SGIs, and I'm already using it there. Really, what's your rationale here? I use what works, with preference given to systems for which I can obtain the source. Linux doesn't run on my SGI Power Challenge, so I don't use it there. It does run on my Suns, and it's better than Solaris, so I do. Where in that thought process is the fanaticism you keep claiming?
You don't get it. I don't hate the commercial unices. Why? Simple - the hardware and software people work together from day one. They sell a few thousand systems at a million bucks a pop to people who, when faced with two minutes a year of downtime, will tell you to go fuck yourself and do business with your competitor. Name one good reason nVidia cares about the stability of its drivers, for any OS. They don't, and by reasonable business practices, they shouldn't. Gamers, their primary if not only market, don't care about occasional crashes. After all, most of them have used winbloze for so long they're accustomed to it. So what if their Linux drivers do the same? Bringing in IBM (or Sun or SGI or $OTHER_CLOSED_SOURCE_UNIX_VENDOR) is ridiculous. Closed source is only really destructive in a commodity market.
So by your estimation, no drivers is better than some drivers.
If the "some" are binary-only for commodity hardware on an open-source OS, yes.
and I thought it was because Linus didn't like Minix or DOS and so he wrote a Unix that he did like.
The GNU project was 8+ years old when Linus started working... How do you think he compiled Linux? With the SunOS compiler? The history of Free Software doesn't begin with Red Hat Linux 4.0, despite what you've been told.
Do you honestly prefer that people use Windows to Linux? Are you sure you aren't really a Microsoft plant?
If it means that vendors will be more likely in the future to provide true support, ie specs, then yes I would rather people use windoze than binary-only drivers under $OPEN_SOURCE_OS. I've never worked for Microsoft or any subsidiary thereof. I refuse even to use their products. If I'm somehow a "plant" because I believe Free Software is a goal worth striving for at the occasional expense of immediate convenience, then I guess I'm a plant.
Aren't nVidia and SGI sharing technology at the moment?
Apparently, though the exact details seem something of a mystery. What I'd much rather see than some crappy binary-only Linux-only drivers for the commodity GeForce is a nice 64xGeForce2 device I could put in my SGI, and a quality IRIX driver for it. But then, SGI has been deluded into thinking peecees are viable technology. Let's see, that leaves...exactly one vendor who hasn't made a peecee yet - Tera/Cray. I think I'll look into their products. Somebody's got to support the non-peecee people while it's still possible.