The thinking here is backwards [LWN.net]

The thinking here is backwards

Posted Sep 11, 2004 10:21 UTC (Sat) by job (subscriber, #670)
Parent article: Improving Linux Driver Installation (O'ReillyNet)

It is obvious that I as an corporate user, would refuse to install
*anything* on my Linux system that has not gone through my distributor.
After all, that's why I pay them. And pushing third-party binary modules
in my running kernel would be a very quick way of nullifying their
support agreements.

For the home user, things might well be different. But most people are
running a distribution anyway, and would probably feel more comfortable
getting drivers from them. That's how they get the security updates, so
both the trust and the technical procedure is already in place. So if the
distributors are to share the workload of getting these drivers, then a
open project may be the right way -- but only for distributing the module
source. Not many users would get drivers from here (Gentoo users come to
mind).

The article has an ivory-tower stance to it and I think it is a mistake.
First we need to establish if this is a problem at all. If the drivers
are few and small then all drivers could be included in a typical
distribution and updated with the rest of the system. Perhaps all that is
needed is for distribution to update their kernel packages more often?

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The thinking here is backwards

Posted Sep 12, 2004 16:10 UTC (Sun) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link]

"Click, here to install third party unsupported (binary) device driver which may or may not destroy your service contract, desktop, personal settings, introduce a worm into your network and cost you your job".
That should serve as an apprpriate warning label.

Why would anyone want to take the chance of having 320x192 images pilfered from your camcorder stream uploaded to the internet?

I agree completely with the "The thinking here is backwards" post. I'm just taking cheap shots at the short sightedness of the article.

Open Source is Open Source why should it be any other way?

The thinking here is backwards

Posted Sep 13, 2004 1:12 UTC (Mon) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

" "Click, here to install third party unsupported (binary) device driver which may or may not destroy your service contract, desktop, personal settings, introduce a worm into your network and cost you your job".
That should serve as an apprpriate warning label. "

hmm... some how i belive that would be a preferable risk than

" Sorry! no support available yet for your hardware."

And "we" dont have to wait another 20 years to see the consequences,... thought, i belive the solution lies in between.

The thinking here is backwards

Posted Sep 13, 2004 4:39 UTC (Mon) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link]

The thread the discussion pertained to corporate application. This "Click here to install driver so I can use the company color printer for my vacation pictures" attitude would be not be acceptable and would be used to thwart plans to penetrate the corporate market. Please focus and stay on task with the discussion.