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Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 16, 2006 18:50 UTC (Thu) by emkey (guest, #144)
In reply to: Resisting the binary blob by khim
Parent article: Resisting the binary blob

The only way to make this freedom reality is to reject binary blobs today.

And you base this assumption on what exactly? Idealism goes nowhere in the real world. I don't like that, but it's a reality. Open Source software has done well to date because there is a good and compelling business case for it. At this point the perception is that this isn't true on the desktop. Linux needs to make significant inroads on the desktop for that to change. And lack of driver support is a significant impediment to having that happen. The good news? Binary drivers exist that solve most of the problems. The bad news? There is no bad news, though some people seem obsessed with pretending there is.

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Posted Nov 17, 2006 7:38 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Binary drivers exist that solve most of the problems.

I wish that was true. Unfortunately it is not. Binary drivers just add more problems to an already fragile desktop market:

they are brittle, and cannot be repaired easily,
they don't admit self-maintenance,
you cannot benefit from others in the community solving the problems (e.g. sending patches to lkml),
in practice they stop some of these people from working on free alternatives, just as BitKeeper prevented use of free tools,
when the vendor gets tired of supporting your hardware you are stuck with a buggy solution, just as in the Windows or Mac OS X world,
efforts cannot be pooled: vendors cannot reuse the code for their own drivers, so the wheel is reinvented for each one,
you cannot get help on lkml because your kernel is tainted,
and finally, their legal status is not clear so distributing them could open distros to being sued by their own developers, not by obscure submarine patent outfits.

It would also appear that this is bad news indeed. And that free drivers are a pretty practical proposition, not an idealist dream. Get real, man! :D

Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 30, 2006 19:38 UTC (Thu) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

Binary drivers do not in and of themselves prevent free drivers. Ergo, they cause no problems in that arena. Which pretty much makes every point you raised moot.

Again, there is no issue here. None. What we have is a very obscure and largely pointless pseudo religious objection by some people.

Resisting the binary blob

Posted Dec 1, 2006 3:01 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

If the binary drivers are installed by default, instead of the free drivers, then every single one of man_ls's points is valid. Binary drivers prevent free drivers when the user doesn't know that the free driver exists.

Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 17, 2006 23:03 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

Idealism goes nowhere in the real world. ... The bad news? There is no bad news, though some people seem obsessed with pretending there is.

And you call khim idealistic? Whoa, my irony-meter just exploded...

You want a compelling business case? I made the business case for my last job. It went something like this: open source gives you control (binary blobs don't, period); it tends to give you security (binary blobs are much murkier in this regard); and it tends to give you reliability (binary blobs tend not to). It's also cheap, but that was merely fourth or fifth on the list. Those are the features that businesses care about.

As for the desktop: personally, I really don't care if there's a business case for it, compelling or otherwise. The business cases for FLOSS servers showed up long after open source itself did, and large market share is relevant only if it advances the FLOSS cause. A large market share that's 95% composed of binary-blob users is utterly useless as a tool to convince device makers to open their specifications, so who needs it? More power to Fedora and Red Hat, says I.

Greg