Um, i think what you mean is that for the price of ONE of these laptops, they could send out vista discs to thousands of influential people. You do realize their ONLY production cost when giving out freebies on vista is the cost to press a dvd/cd/whatever it is stored on.
No, that's not true... think of the loss of potential revenue. Those people would have paid $300 or so per copy, which is money out of M$'s pocket... food off of their plate... money that rightfully belongs to them. Just like when you pirate a movie - regardless of whether you would have seen it legally or not - that's money that the MPAA immediately feel the loss of, when they can't afford to send their kids to college anymore.
("dvd/cd/whatever it is stored on" - it's a DVD. It has to be, since all Vista DVDs have both 32 and 64-bit versions on them, as well as all the functionality of 'Vista Ultimate', which you need to pay more for to 'unlock'. So you see, the additional 'Ultimate' functionality is already on the DVD, but if you don't pay extra for it, you are taking money off of Microsoft's plate... food out of their pocket... um... or something)
Thank you for that calm voice of reason. Here is my answer to the actual question put forth:
The only evidence given for the claim is the issue of 4-5 day delays for Firefox patches on Ubuntu, versus same-day response for Red Hat. Now, this is a good point, and Canonical should improve in this respect. However, 2 things should be said: (1) Microsoft does not seem to reply very quickly to critical vulnerabilities - not that this is an excuse, but it does go to show that a few days' wait isn't enough to make something 'not a serious desktop' (even when 99% of vulnerabilities are for that particular platform), and (2) Canonical has recently reached an arrangement with the Mozilla people about using Firefox on Ubuntu; unlike Debian, Ubuntu will ship with a nearly-identical version of Firefox to the original Mozilla code. This may allow faster security responses in the future (by distributing the Mozilla patches more or less directly - Debian will have more work to do, since their version is more different). However, in the long term, Firefox 1.5 (shipped on Ubuntu 6.06) will eventually not be supported by Mozilla, leaving the burden to Canonical. Whether they can deal with backporting security patches (or writing completely new ones, if needed), for various versions of Firefox simultaneously, is an open question. Yet, Debian will be doing so (and for even longer periods of time), so they may be able to lean on that.
Apparently Realtek deserves an honorary mention, since TFA says "Realtek has reportedly been responsive to requests for hardware documentation without requiring a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)" - the only difference from the wording for Ralink and Amtel is the addition of 'reportedly'. Oddly TFA doesn't explain the difference, but perhaps they just had less information about Realtek's relationships with OSS developers. Anyhow from the interview with the Realtek spokesperson they seem as OSS-friendly as the other two.
At the higher level, we run into a problem where a society becomes ever more effective at imposing its value system upon the members of that society. [...] What happens when these cameras are present in a area rife with racism and the viewers themselves are racist? I can imagine blacks being harshly treated, with intolerance, and whites being let off or lightly treated for the same acts.
Without addressing the main issue in your post, I have to say something about this often-heard argument. Put more bluntly, what is claimed here is that incompetence is the safeguard of freedom: if government(/society) is bumbling enough, it won't be able to enforce unfair policies.
Yet, maintaining freedom by government incompetence is a dangerous route, because (1) it may be impotent to act when it is needed, (2) incompetence as a government policy may very well lead to corruption and waste ("it's good that I'm an inefficient government clerk; I'm maintaining freedom for the populace!"), and (3) people now need to know not just what is legal, but what is 'effectively legal', i.e. not legal but what government incompetence makes legal because no-one is prosecuted for it, which can also lead to (4) selective, discriminatory enforcement by the government ("we can't prosecute all who break this law, so we do what we can" - but those that are prosecuted just 'happen' to belong to some particular group or minority - note that this is the exact same argument as appears in the quoted paragraph above, but arguing the opposite claim).
But there is indeed an intuition that an 'overly-efficient' government is a danger. I think the underlying issue is that, in some situations, there may be a disparity between what the people want and what the people they elect want (e.g. where I live at least, the majority of the population are in favor of legalizing pot, or at least indifferent; but lawmakers are strongly against it). And the simplest way to solve the problem stemming from that disparity seems to be to just make government inefficient (if the cops don't do their job and arrest potheads, then pot is effectively free, just as if it were legally free).
But the 'simplest way' is often a very poor solution. The 'right' solution would be to protest, to fight for the causes people care about, so that lawmakers are in tune with the public; perhaps also to implement a more direct democracy. Government incompetence as a way to maintain freedom is an ugly hack, in programmer's terms; problem is, people are too lazy to do things the correct way.
"Who has Microsoft actually sued over patent infringement?"
Why make this a general debate about Microsoft's patents (or patents in general)? The current patent is very specific, and isn't accurately summarized in TFA anyhow, so debate here may be skewed. The actual patent states specifically, in the "Background" section:
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is one type of web content syndication format
i.e. Microsoft is NOT patenting RSS, which is one possible misconception. Secondly, the patent mentions various problems with RSS (various file formats, lack of a single unified reader for the entire desktop), which they intend to fix. So, they may be looking to patent a system that uses RSS or improves it; presumably this would run on Vista, but to say they are "patenting RSS in Vista" seems odd.
IANAL, but as far as I know, it does not work both ways. A judge can set aside a guilty verdict that does not conform to law, but he cannot convict a defendant if an acquittal was not according to law.
"It's easy enough to say that, but Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies are not likely to be very happy when the next version of Samba rolls out and they can't use it because it is licensed under version 3 of the GPL and Novell can't distribute GPLv3 apps and still maintain its deal with Microsoft."
This is more or less what I think, but two qualifications are needed IMO: first, Novell may be able to distribute GPL3 apps, just not those for which they have patent coverage from Microsoft - this assumes that there are undisclosed parts of the deal which specify certain things as covered. But anyhow, even if that is true, presumably Samba would be one of the things Microsoft claims as its 'own', so your argument would still hold.
A second issue is that Novell wouldn't be able to distribute Samba, but a third party could do it for them. Some small corporation - call it 'PawnWare' - might be under contract with Novell to distribute Samba to Novell customers. Novell itself would handle all the support, etc., of course. This would be legal, but it would leave the Novell customers with only the GPL3 as their patent coverage, and not the Microsoft-Novell deal - so I don't know if this would fly. Still, there may be some other legal maneuver that Novell think up that lets them use GPL3 Samba, and not fork the GPL2 version of it. Hopefully the GPL3 will make such maneuvers complicated and costly, as the example given above is.
"What's important is that Linux is free and will remain to be free. The source code is open to everybody, this is what counts for me."
'Open' source code that is under Microsoft patents, and therefore isn't free-to-use - or, more to the point, is free-to-be-sued-for-using - isn't really 'free', I would say. And how is Linux "still free", if Novell needs to pay Microsoft to keep it that way?
It isn't a donation unless I choose for myself to give the money. (You are talking about having government take my earnings by force and redistribute them to the groups which they choose, aren't you?)
Taking your earnings by force would be called 'taxes', I believe;) . Seriously, though, funding basic scientific research - that has no immediate financial gain - is a legitimate thing for government to spend tax money on, IMO.
Both donations by private citizens and government spending are useful for basic research, I think.
*Cures* are not good for business [...] And this i find truly disturbing.
True, but who said the drug companies' purpose in life is to cure Humanity's ills? They are in it for the money, and free to work on whatever they want. But the point is, other entities have the explicit purpose to cure illnesses: nonprofits and universities. Funding for them is mostly donations or government grants (and there is plenty of money in both, but should always be more).
We shouldn't expect too much from the drug companies; they are money-seeking corporations, nothing more, and often corrupt to boot. What we should do is make sure that donation and grant money for nonprofit research is plentiful, and rely on them to solve our health problems.
None of this detracts from TFA's point, however, that the patent system may need modification: even if we don't expect the drug companies to cure illnesses, we still can change things so that they do what they do do (pills that alleviate symptoms) better.
When we see something like 6 fingers in a human, we think its a flaw. Why do we think that these defects are flaw not as step to human evolution?
You are right on the mark. Deciding what is a 'flaw' is a cultural decision, a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth here. Is short stature a 'flaw' in Pygmies? Perhaps the Pygmies think otherwise; perhaps we all might think otherwise if tomorrow some predator existed that attacked only tall people and virtually wiped them all out, or a food source appeared which was much easier to find for short people. Even attempts to 'prove' something is a 'flaw' biologically is doomed to fail - if Pygmies are short because they have less growth hormone, who can say what is the "normal" amount of that hormone? All we can say is that a certain amount of it is "statistically normal" in that it is commonplace, and certain other amounts are less-often seen.
Calling something a 'flaw' is a value judgment. Value judgments are opinions, points of view. Not to get all postmodern - not everything is "just a point of view" - e.g. Pygmies ARE short. The interpretation of that fact is, however, just an opinion.
Parent makes an interesting point. Who would risk going to any public protest for anything (war, whatever) knowing that you will probably turn up in a Google image search for doing so?
Time to take off the tinfoil had sonny. If IE7 still sent out URLs visited after you told it not to, the lawyers would have a field day, and MS would have a huge PR problem. I am sure this was checked and double checked numerous times to make sure that it didn't happen.
Sure, because big corporations never make big mistakes. But anyhow, just because it 'doesn't make sense' to you doesn't make it not so. Do you have any evidence? Until you or the grandparent post show some actual facts, I won't believe either one of you.
Well, this is a minor matter in a well-written post which deals with much bigger issues, but I thought I'd say something about it:
The FSF sees this as a stellar opportunity to push the advancement of free software gaming
Actually, this might also push the advancement of proprietary gaming, interestingly, at least on the server side. Any company will be able to take the GPL code and utilize it, since unless they distribute the code, the GPL can't come into play (as it is based on copyright law). And if the code remains on their servers, it isn't distributed. However there might be legal issues with copying it from one server to another, internally... IANAL.
On the client side, a GPL client obviously can't be proprietized. But the server code might. I'm not sure it's a problem, but it is something people should be aware of. GPL server code may effectively be BSD.
Furthermore, even if "[Java's use declines] in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#", that would only be true of Java-as-a-language, not Java-as-a-platform. JRuby and JPython, for example, may increase in use, particularly since Java is/will soon be open-sourced. If there are benefits to running those two languages on the Java platform (and there may be: speed/stability, and perhaps access to Java libraries), there is no reason why not to.
the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
Yeah, a year and a half ago, the idea of using emoticons was an amazing inspiration. Nobody used them then. I don't think they even had the interweb yet.
Yes, TFA does seem to assume way too much cleverness on Novell's side of the deal. For example he says
"When I consider Novell to be the party of advantage in the Microsoft partnership deal, the tone of the agreement changes. Microsoft is handing 70,000 copies of a primary competitor's operating system to existing Windows customers, introducing Windows-only shops to the advantages of the heterogeneous enterprise."
Or, more likely, 70,000 coupons for SUSE will gather dust in a Microsoft drawer.
The only reason the parent gave was that he feels commercial software being made available for Linux is a good thing. Is this what you are disagreeing with?
I disagree that running commercial software is reason enough for having binary kernel modules. Now, commercial software is fine, if you want/need that sort of thing, but you should run it in userspace. Binary drivers in the kernel are something else altogether.
AFAIK most commercial software written for Linux does not need to run anything as a kernel module, so the connection between "having commercial software on Linux" and "binary drivers in the kernel" is fairly slim, anyhow. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Besides that, i agree with Linus, binary modules should not be banned. Because of the ability to use binary modules, a lot of commercial software are made available and that is A Good Thing (Tm)
Linus's reasons, as appear in his message, are completely and utterly different from yours. To briefly summarize: first, this prevents USE of binary modules, but the GPL can only come into effect when you DISTRIBUTE something (via copyright law). Second, this will just annoy people, by shoving the kernel developers' opinions down their throat (any they can change the kernel source to allow binary modules anyhow). Third, it won't work, because a small GPLed "shim" can load a binary driver (as NVidia already do).
However, he hates binary drivers, and for good reason. I agree both with this and with his reasons, and disagree with yours.
You cannot fight against evolution and win. If your solution includes telling people to go against their most basic desires and needs, it is certain failure.
Civilization is exactly 'going against people's basic desires and needs'. In the end, a compromise is reached somewhere in the middle.
Giving up in advance, as you seem to suggest, is the path to ruin.
I can imagine that Sony and Nintendo are none to amused at this, so I'll just sit back and wait for them to file antitrust complaints.
This was at the bottom of your post. I think it should be more prominent, since this is an excellent point: Windows is a monopoly; getting developers to prefer XBOX to other consoles because of Windows-interoperability is using a monopoly to gain an advantage in another field.
This is no different than if Office had some 'special hooks' into Windows (before Office was a monopoly as well), or things along those lines.
I must say, after having read TFA and other comments by Red Hat officials about the recent developments in the software world, I am full of respect for them. The analysis of the drawbacks of 'Unbreakable Linux' are well stated, and the dismissal of the MS-Novell deal, as well as an unshaking resolve to not enter into a similar deal, is commendable. I don't currently use any Red Hat products, but when/if I have an influence on Linux purchasing procedures (where I currently am, or elsewhere), I will certainly lean in their direction.
(If you want, look at my previous posts on Slashdot to see that I have no general pro- or anti- Red Hat bias.)
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Um, i think what you mean is that for the price of ONE of these laptops, they could send out vista discs to thousands of influential people. You do realize their ONLY production cost when giving out freebies on vista is the cost to press a dvd/cd/whatever it is stored on.
No, that's not true... think of the loss of potential revenue. Those people would have paid $300 or so per copy, which is money out of M$'s pocket... food off of their plate... money that rightfully belongs to them. Just like when you pirate a movie - regardless of whether you would have seen it legally or not - that's money that the MPAA immediately feel the loss of, when they can't afford to send their kids to college anymore.
("dvd/cd/whatever it is stored on" - it's a DVD. It has to be, since all Vista DVDs have both 32 and 64-bit versions on them, as well as all the functionality of 'Vista Ultimate', which you need to pay more for to 'unlock'. So you see, the additional 'Ultimate' functionality is already on the DVD, but if you don't pay extra for it, you are taking money off of Microsoft's plate... food out of their pocket... um... or something)
Thank you for that calm voice of reason. Here is my answer to the actual question put forth:
The only evidence given for the claim is the issue of 4-5 day delays for Firefox patches on Ubuntu, versus same-day response for Red Hat. Now, this is a good point, and Canonical should improve in this respect. However, 2 things should be said: (1) Microsoft does not seem to reply very quickly to critical vulnerabilities - not that this is an excuse, but it does go to show that a few days' wait isn't enough to make something 'not a serious desktop' (even when 99% of vulnerabilities are for that particular platform), and (2) Canonical has recently reached an arrangement with the Mozilla people about using Firefox on Ubuntu; unlike Debian, Ubuntu will ship with a nearly-identical version of Firefox to the original Mozilla code. This may allow faster security responses in the future (by distributing the Mozilla patches more or less directly - Debian will have more work to do, since their version is more different). However, in the long term, Firefox 1.5 (shipped on Ubuntu 6.06) will eventually not be supported by Mozilla, leaving the burden to Canonical. Whether they can deal with backporting security patches (or writing completely new ones, if needed), for various versions of Firefox simultaneously, is an open question. Yet, Debian will be doing so (and for even longer periods of time), so they may be able to lean on that.
I don't know whether this is true or not, about the FCC, but if it were - how could some vendors give OSS drivers, and some not?
"The two companies are Ralink and Amtel."
Apparently Realtek deserves an honorary mention, since TFA says "Realtek has reportedly been responsive to requests for hardware documentation without requiring a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)" - the only difference from the wording for Ralink and Amtel is the addition of 'reportedly'. Oddly TFA doesn't explain the difference, but perhaps they just had less information about Realtek's relationships with OSS developers. Anyhow from the interview with the Realtek spokesperson they seem as OSS-friendly as the other two.
At the higher level, we run into a problem where a society becomes ever more effective at imposing its value system upon the members of that society. [...] What happens when these cameras are present in a area rife with racism and the viewers themselves are racist? I can imagine blacks being harshly treated, with intolerance, and whites being let off or lightly treated for the same acts.
Without addressing the main issue in your post, I have to say something about this often-heard argument. Put more bluntly, what is claimed here is that incompetence is the safeguard of freedom: if government(/society) is bumbling enough, it won't be able to enforce unfair policies.
Yet, maintaining freedom by government incompetence is a dangerous route, because (1) it may be impotent to act when it is needed, (2) incompetence as a government policy may very well lead to corruption and waste ("it's good that I'm an inefficient government clerk; I'm maintaining freedom for the populace!"), and (3) people now need to know not just what is legal, but what is 'effectively legal', i.e. not legal but what government incompetence makes legal because no-one is prosecuted for it, which can also lead to (4) selective, discriminatory enforcement by the government ("we can't prosecute all who break this law, so we do what we can" - but those that are prosecuted just 'happen' to belong to some particular group or minority - note that this is the exact same argument as appears in the quoted paragraph above, but arguing the opposite claim).
But there is indeed an intuition that an 'overly-efficient' government is a danger. I think the underlying issue is that, in some situations, there may be a disparity between what the people want and what the people they elect want (e.g. where I live at least, the majority of the population are in favor of legalizing pot, or at least indifferent; but lawmakers are strongly against it). And the simplest way to solve the problem stemming from that disparity seems to be to just make government inefficient (if the cops don't do their job and arrest potheads, then pot is effectively free, just as if it were legally free).
But the 'simplest way' is often a very poor solution. The 'right' solution would be to protest, to fight for the causes people care about, so that lawmakers are in tune with the public; perhaps also to implement a more direct democracy. Government incompetence as a way to maintain freedom is an ugly hack, in programmer's terms; problem is, people are too lazy to do things the correct way.
"Who has Microsoft actually sued over patent infringement?"
Why make this a general debate about Microsoft's patents (or patents in general)? The current patent is very specific, and isn't accurately summarized in TFA anyhow, so debate here may be skewed. The actual patent states specifically, in the "Background" section:
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is one type of web content syndication format
i.e. Microsoft is NOT patenting RSS, which is one possible misconception. Secondly, the patent mentions various problems with RSS (various file formats, lack of a single unified reader for the entire desktop), which they intend to fix. So, they may be looking to patent a system that uses RSS or improves it; presumably this would run on Vista, but to say they are "patenting RSS in Vista" seems odd.
"...Mark Shuttleworth is making it very clear that Ubuntu is a for profit venture. He could very well start charging money for something soon"
Like support, which they already offer?
IANAL, but as far as I know, it does not work both ways. A judge can set aside a guilty verdict that does not conform to law, but he cannot convict a defendant if an acquittal was not according to law.
"It's easy enough to say that, but Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies are not likely to be very happy when the next version of Samba rolls out and they can't use it because it is licensed under version 3 of the GPL and Novell can't distribute GPLv3 apps and still maintain its deal with Microsoft."
This is more or less what I think, but two qualifications are needed IMO: first, Novell may be able to distribute GPL3 apps, just not those for which they have patent coverage from Microsoft - this assumes that there are undisclosed parts of the deal which specify certain things as covered. But anyhow, even if that is true, presumably Samba would be one of the things Microsoft claims as its 'own', so your argument would still hold.
A second issue is that Novell wouldn't be able to distribute Samba, but a third party could do it for them. Some small corporation - call it 'PawnWare' - might be under contract with Novell to distribute Samba to Novell customers. Novell itself would handle all the support, etc., of course. This would be legal, but it would leave the Novell customers with only the GPL3 as their patent coverage, and not the Microsoft-Novell deal - so I don't know if this would fly. Still, there may be some other legal maneuver that Novell think up that lets them use GPL3 Samba, and not fork the GPL2 version of it. Hopefully the GPL3 will make such maneuvers complicated and costly, as the example given above is.
His explanation seems very weak to me:
"What's important is that Linux is free and will remain to be free. The source code is open to everybody, this is what counts for me."
'Open' source code that is under Microsoft patents, and therefore isn't free-to-use - or, more to the point, is free-to-be-sued-for-using - isn't really 'free', I would say. And how is Linux "still free", if Novell needs to pay Microsoft to keep it that way?
It isn't a donation unless I choose for myself to give the money. (You are talking about having government take my earnings by force and redistribute them to the groups which they choose, aren't you?)
;) . Seriously, though, funding basic scientific research - that has no immediate financial gain - is a legitimate thing for government to spend tax money on, IMO.
Taking your earnings by force would be called 'taxes', I believe
Both donations by private citizens and government spending are useful for basic research, I think.
*Cures* are not good for business [...] And this i find truly disturbing.
True, but who said the drug companies' purpose in life is to cure Humanity's ills? They are in it for the money, and free to work on whatever they want. But the point is, other entities have the explicit purpose to cure illnesses: nonprofits and universities. Funding for them is mostly donations or government grants (and there is plenty of money in both, but should always be more).
We shouldn't expect too much from the drug companies; they are money-seeking corporations, nothing more, and often corrupt to boot. What we should do is make sure that donation and grant money for nonprofit research is plentiful, and rely on them to solve our health problems.
None of this detracts from TFA's point, however, that the patent system may need modification: even if we don't expect the drug companies to cure illnesses, we still can change things so that they do what they do do (pills that alleviate symptoms) better.
When we see something like 6 fingers in a human, we think its a flaw. Why do we think that these defects are flaw not as step to human evolution?
You are right on the mark. Deciding what is a 'flaw' is a cultural decision, a matter of opinion. There is no objective truth here. Is short stature a 'flaw' in Pygmies? Perhaps the Pygmies think otherwise; perhaps we all might think otherwise if tomorrow some predator existed that attacked only tall people and virtually wiped them all out, or a food source appeared which was much easier to find for short people. Even attempts to 'prove' something is a 'flaw' biologically is doomed to fail - if Pygmies are short because they have less growth hormone, who can say what is the "normal" amount of that hormone? All we can say is that a certain amount of it is "statistically normal" in that it is commonplace, and certain other amounts are less-often seen.
Calling something a 'flaw' is a value judgment. Value judgments are opinions, points of view. Not to get all postmodern - not everything is "just a point of view" - e.g. Pygmies ARE short. The interpretation of that fact is, however, just an opinion.
"Come on... Cleaner than SOAP? What could be cleaner than SOAP?"
...it's self-cleaning!" - Chandler
"Soap?
Parent makes an interesting point. Who would risk going to any public protest for anything (war, whatever) knowing that you will probably turn up in a Google image search for doing so?
Someone who really believes in the cause?
Time to take off the tinfoil had sonny. If IE7 still sent out URLs visited after you told it not to, the lawyers would have a field day, and MS would have a huge PR problem. I am sure this was checked and double checked numerous times to make sure that it didn't happen.
Sure, because big corporations never make big mistakes. But anyhow, just because it 'doesn't make sense' to you doesn't make it not so. Do you have any evidence? Until you or the grandparent post show some actual facts, I won't believe either one of you.
Well, this is a minor matter in a well-written post which deals with much bigger issues, but I thought I'd say something about it:
The FSF sees this as a stellar opportunity to push the advancement of free software gaming
Actually, this might also push the advancement of proprietary gaming, interestingly, at least on the server side. Any company will be able to take the GPL code and utilize it, since unless they distribute the code, the GPL can't come into play (as it is based on copyright law). And if the code remains on their servers, it isn't distributed. However there might be legal issues with copying it from one server to another, internally... IANAL.
On the client side, a GPL client obviously can't be proprietized. But the server code might. I'm not sure it's a problem, but it is something people should be aware of. GPL server code may effectively be BSD.
Furthermore, even if "[Java's use declines] in favor of dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) and C#", that would only be true of Java-as-a-language, not Java-as-a-platform. JRuby and JPython, for example, may increase in use, particularly since Java is/will soon be open-sourced. If there are benefits to running those two languages on the Java platform (and there may be: speed/stability, and perhaps access to Java libraries), there is no reason why not to.
the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
Yeah, a year and a half ago, the idea of using emoticons was an amazing inspiration. Nobody used them then. I don't think they even had the interweb yet.
Yes, TFA does seem to assume way too much cleverness on Novell's side of the deal. For example he says
"When I consider Novell to be the party of advantage in the Microsoft partnership deal, the tone of the agreement changes. Microsoft is handing 70,000 copies of a primary competitor's operating system to existing Windows customers, introducing Windows-only shops to the advantages of the heterogeneous enterprise."
Or, more likely, 70,000 coupons for SUSE will gather dust in a Microsoft drawer.
The only reason the parent gave was that he feels commercial software being made available for Linux is a good thing. Is this what you are disagreeing with?
I disagree that running commercial software is reason enough for having binary kernel modules. Now, commercial software is fine, if you want/need that sort of thing, but you should run it in userspace. Binary drivers in the kernel are something else altogether.
AFAIK most commercial software written for Linux does not need to run anything as a kernel module, so the connection between "having commercial software on Linux" and "binary drivers in the kernel" is fairly slim, anyhow. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Besides that, i agree with Linus, binary modules should not be banned. Because of the ability to use binary modules, a lot of commercial software are made available and that is A Good Thing (Tm)
Linus's reasons, as appear in his message, are completely and utterly different from yours. To briefly summarize: first, this prevents USE of binary modules, but the GPL can only come into effect when you DISTRIBUTE something (via copyright law). Second, this will just annoy people, by shoving the kernel developers' opinions down their throat (any they can change the kernel source to allow binary modules anyhow). Third, it won't work, because a small GPLed "shim" can load a binary driver (as NVidia already do).
However, he hates binary drivers, and for good reason. I agree both with this and with his reasons, and disagree with yours.
You cannot fight against evolution and win. If your solution includes telling people to go against their most basic desires and needs, it is certain failure.
Civilization is exactly 'going against people's basic desires and needs'. In the end, a compromise is reached somewhere in the middle.
Giving up in advance, as you seem to suggest, is the path to ruin.
I can imagine that Sony and Nintendo are none to amused at this, so I'll just sit back and wait for them to file antitrust complaints.
This was at the bottom of your post. I think it should be more prominent, since this is an excellent point: Windows is a monopoly; getting developers to prefer XBOX to other consoles because of Windows-interoperability is using a monopoly to gain an advantage in another field.
This is no different than if Office had some 'special hooks' into Windows (before Office was a monopoly as well), or things along those lines.
I must say, after having read TFA and other comments by Red Hat officials about the recent developments in the software world, I am full of respect for them. The analysis of the drawbacks of 'Unbreakable Linux' are well stated, and the dismissal of the MS-Novell deal, as well as an unshaking resolve to not enter into a similar deal, is commendable. I don't currently use any Red Hat products, but when/if I have an influence on Linux purchasing procedures (where I currently am, or elsewhere), I will certainly lean in their direction.
(If you want, look at my previous posts on Slashdot to see that I have no general pro- or anti- Red Hat bias.)