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Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Posted Aug 5, 2009 23:06 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration by davi
Parent article: Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

Not at all. He thinks the best way to win against proprietary software is to get more users running Linux today. If a non-free video card driver is what's needed to persuade people to run Linux instead of Windows or Mac OS, then it would be foolish to push people away from Linux by not offering that option. You don't have to be a purist on the RMS level to support free software.

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Posted Aug 6, 2009 18:22 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Sure, you don't have to be a purist, but you do have to be a fairly large scale employer of kernel hackers in order to ship a kernel that's too far away from mainline. AFAIK the only place you can get real support for the full "Nvidiux" is from HP's workstation people.

Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2009 10:19 UTC (Tue) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]

He may think that, though one might also reasonably not think that. It depends in part on what one's goals are. Having more users who are willing to install proprietary drivers will certainly increase the availability of proprietary drivers, but if one's principle aim is to increase the availability of free drivers, then one wants to give a sales advantage to those hardware vendors who do ensure that free drivers are available.

However, I don't see how this is relevant to whether the proposal is good or not.

Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2009 19:06 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

it can be argued that allowing the use of proprietary drivers can increase the use of free drivers as well

remember that if someone wouldn't use linux due to the lack of a free driver for some component they aren't going to be using the free drivers for everything else in their system. so allowing for one proprietary driver can cause a dozen free drivers to be used that otherwise wouldn't be used.