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Free alternativesFree alternativesPosted Sep 1, 2006 22:53 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: My Concern by emkey Parent article: Fedora Core to drop openmotif
What I do care about is people calling for the removal of all non free software. Even in instances where the risk is minimal or non existent and the cost is high. Device drivers for instance.You will appreciate that the goal of such removals is not to bother people, but to encourage the development and adoption of free alternatives. These alternatives are important especially for device drivers: imagine what would happen if Microsoft were to buy ATI and nVidia tomorrow with their huge cash reserves, and withdraw their proprietary drivers; they could even remove permission to distribute the last available versions. A lot of users would get burned instantly and leave the platform in droves. While a gradual removal of proprietary drivers can be handled more or less gracefully. If you are talking about firmware binary blobs, then I'm not sure about their legal status. From what little I've read about it, it is hard to know what would happen if publishing companies turned evil. It is however easy to see that free versions would have no problems, so nurturing free replacements would still seem to be a worthy goal. In both cases you are right that suddenly removing all proprietary bits would be instant disaster, but a gradual replacement and removal policy doesn't seem so far out to me.
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Free alternatives Posted Sep 2, 2006 6:45 UTC (Sat) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] Free drivers will always lag. And if past experience is any indicator they will lag significantly. Reverse engineering takes time and is seldom perfect. Throw in the fact that there are provisions in the digital millenium copyright act that make reverse engineering illegal and the picture gets even more grim if the scenario you outline were to happen.
Free alternatives Posted Sep 2, 2006 10:53 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Free drivers will always lag. And if past experience is any indicator they will lag significantly.The majority of drivers on my Linux system are at least as good as their proprietary counterparts. I don't see them lagging in any significant way. Only graphics drivers, and only for 3D, and only for modern cards without specs, and only from ATI and nVidia, lag. This is a transient status: past experience seems to indicate that free drivers will eventually get there (as they have for Wi-Fi cards) and then surpass proprietary equivalents. We are already there for Intel, and with the recent acquisition of ATI it might change faster than we think. [...] there are provisions in the digital millenium copyright act [...]Those provisions are only for copyright protection measures, do not fear.
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