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Thanks for volunteeringThanks for volunteeringPosted Mar 6, 2010 20:10 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)In reply to: Thanks for volunteering by lxoliva Parent article: Linux-2.6.33-libre released
I wasn't talking about distros at all and that is a distraction from the
point I was making which is that while freedom is a good value it is a bit more abstract for a lot of users and you should try your best to provide a good user experience and consider participating in efforts to write free firmware replacements such as the OpenFWWF one for Broadcom
When Fedora includes the firmware by default a lot of users were pleasantly
To give another example we had for several years talked about how
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What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 20:59 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Sustainable distribution of non-Free Software (no matter how much Free Software is put in the mix) doesn't seem like a goal I share, or something I'd like to be involved in :-(
Now, if you meant that feeding people's addictions to non-Free Software will somehow pave the way for software freedom for all, and get everyone to, some day, stop using all the non-Free Software they became dependent on (it doesn't have to be the same day for everyone, mind you), I'm very interested in reading your thoughts on how to accomplish that. Thanks in advance,
BTW, 3D doesn't work on ATI cards on systems with only Free Software installed. In fact, without the non-Free firmware, loading up the radeon driver messes up the whole system, as I have experienced first-hand, and that others confirmed in this discussion.
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 21:18 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
To repeat I was referring to distribution of free and open source drivers
as the more sustainable path and who said anything about sustainable distribution of non-free software? You seem to be reading things which I have never said and doing it repeatedly for some reason and asking me to justify things I have never said is pointless and annoying
Progress often happens in stages and again Nouveau is a good example of
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 22:00 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
You wrote of distributing the software for wireless cards and ATI video cards to work out of the box, but those are unfortunately not Free Software. You wrote including this non-Free Software (and also some Free Software) convinced users this was a more sustainable path in the longer term.
Sustainable means it's something one can keep on doing indefinitely. Whether or not distributing mixtures of non-Free and Free Software is suitainable is not relevant to the goals of liberating the cyberspace, eliminating non-Free Software and enabling all users to be Free. Why would we want or even care that this is sustainable?
Progress is welcome, and nouveau is indeed a great example, which is why it is cited in the article. (BTW, thanks for letting me know about advances that were quite unexpected to me!)
Hut firmware for ATI video cards and many WiFi cards are counter examples to the progress. Instead of motivating people to write replacements, they accommodate people in their addiction, and induces others to enter the progressive addiction path.
Your writing seems to given equal value to the just-Freed nouveau and the proprietary software that controls ATI video cards and many WiFi cards, to the point of saying we needed to provide users with more of the latter. I strongly object to that notion. If you didn't mean to suggest that, I'm very interested in knowing what it is that you're actually suggesting.
(reads again)
Here's another possibility of reading what you wrote that, although requiring some corrections and assumptions, indicates I've misunderstood much of what you wrote:
When you wrote of wireless cards and happily-surprised users, you were only referring to b43 cards on which openfwwf worked, not to wireless cards in general. Now, I don't know whether Fedora shipped the non-Free firmware for b43. If it did, as I assumed because it ships non-Free firmware for lots of WiFi cards, users wouldn't be surprised with the inclusion of openfwwf, but they would have been surprised years ago when Fedora started adding non-Free firmware.
When you wrote of 3D on ATI video, you made a mistake, because 3D doesn't work on ATI video cards unless the non-Free firmware is loaded. Even nouveau, as currently provided in all Fedora releases that have ever included nouveau, still requires has non-Free blobs built into it. The exception is the last two or three builds in the development tree for F-13, that has 2.6.33 patched with the post-2.6.33 fixes that finally made 3D on nVidia cards functional without non-Free Software.
So, if you were speaking only of openfwwf and the just-Freed nouveau as examples of stuff we need more of, and the reference to ATI was a mistake, we're in full agreement. But if it was something else, can you please clarify? TIA,
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 23:02 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Your second reading is closer to my position than your first reading which
has a lot of misunderstandings in it but you haven't got everything I said correctly
Nouveau is a example where progress happened in different stages
a) A few people participated in writing a completely free driver
I am suggesting that the Radeon driver can progress this way as well and
"Now, I don't know whether Fedora shipped the non-Free firmware for b43. If
Your assumption here is wrong because the non-free firmware for b43 is not
If Fedora included the non-free b43 firmware somehow then Free replacement
I am suggesting that freedom can lead to a better user experience which is
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 21:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Without the non-free firmware the card works fine, if unaccelerated. And I
far prefer a small amount of non-free firmware and a large body of free software to the memory-leaking slow dysfunctional closed unfixable horror that was fglrx...
I'm not going to chastise ATI/AMD for going from adamant hostility to free
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 22:09 UTC (Sat) by lxoliva (subscriber, #40702) [Link]
Their change in stance was welcome. They didn't have to rewrite the blobs, though. They could just set them Free, or release enough info so that others can rewrite them. Surely they have either if not both.
My old ATI card works fine only if I blacklist the radeon driver. I had it completely disabled for a long time (it didn't work after replacing the blobs disguised as sources with empty arrays), and when the blobs were moved out of the tree, I tried again, but then I ran into the interrupt storm, figured it still wouldn't work and moved on.
What's the goal? Posted Mar 6, 2010 23:50 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Personally, I'm glad they chose to release info and get working on the
code as soon as they could, rather than waiting for God knows how long for the lawyers to clear *everything* before starting any work at all. The wait for docs was years long as it was.
The interrupt storm, well, IRQ support is very new and IRQs are only
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