Resisting the binary blob

Resisting the binary blob

Posted Nov 17, 2006 23:03 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
In reply to: Resisting the binary blob by emkey
Parent article: Resisting the binary blob

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

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