GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)
Posted May 15, 2006 22:17 UTC (Mon) by
jpetso (guest, #36230)
In reply to:
GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge) by einstein
Parent article:
GPL concerns halt Kororaa live CD (NewsForge)
If we give in so easily and tell them "Your closed source nVidia drivers
are alright, so we'll use them everywhere" then they won't ever think of
open sourcing them.
Buying Intel graphics is a good thing, but it's hardly effective at all.
I mean, even KDE developers buy IBM T60 notebooks with nVidia graphics
(and only rant afterwards), so I think the amount of lost graphics cards
is not noticable for nVidia and ATI at all.
Waiting for a higher market share? That is when all of those are using
Linux who don't give a damn about the software freedom values. You think
they will pressure nVidia? I think they'll bitch about Linux being
controlled by political hardliners. It's already hard to support
open-source-only policies today, and it will be impossible when more of
the "we just want Linux to work, fuck the GPL zealots" guys are on board.
Further, if there hasn't been done anything by the time that Linux has
gained 10% market share, then closed source graphics drivers will be so
established that you can't change policies then.
It has to happen now. If none of the distributions ship proprietary
drivers by default, then the vendors might come to the conclusion that
this is not what they want, and rather get the drivers into the distros.
Every distro doing exceptions hurts this reasoning (on the forefront:
Linspire), so I'm all for Kororaa going offline. If nothing else, it
gives another press release saying that ATI and nVidia can't have their
way so easily.
If there are only VESA drivers available for the nVidia and ATI cards,
guess how long it will take for all Linux users to buy Intel in the
future? Even if it's only 1-2%, this would be a major hit for the
companies, and I think they would rather open source the driver than not
offering it at all. And even if they don't, well, so be it. There can be
a lot of happy Intel users though. But don't show them that offering
binary, proprietary drivers is the way to go.
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