The very first part of the scenario is bogus [LWN.net]

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 5, 2005 23:54 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
Parent article: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

The bogus part is the idea that the enterprise distributions will sign up to support binary-only kernel modules. Why would they? Doing so is a promise to keep vital systems running even if third party code that they cannot debug repeatedly crashes the system.

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 6, 2005 4:24 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Why would they?

To make money, lots of it. Imagine vendors like HP, Dell or IBM promising a distributor big bucks for shipping (supporting, allowing etc.) a binary module that supports their hardware only. Something along the lines of Compaq EFS for SCO OpenServer - the stuff that you could get only for Compaq machines under SCO OpenServer. Greed does funny things to people...

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 6, 2005 7:40 UTC (Tue) by fenrus (guest, #31654) [Link] (1 responses)

actually both RH and SuSE do support binary modules... for certain modules/vendors they have cross support agreements with.

That part isn't fictional or even "future".

The very first part of the scenario is bogus

Posted Dec 9, 2005 15:06 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Indeed. Mandrake did (and I imagine Mandriva does) as well. They ship
quite a bit of binary-only stuff, kernel modules, codecs, additional
software, in their "paid" versions, that they can't legally distribute in
their free for download versions.

That's actually one of the reasons I switched to the downloadable
versions, because otherwise, I was subsidizing non-free software. If I
had ANY interest in doing that, I'd still be on MSWormOS, as dumping it in
favor of Linux after a decade on the proprietary platform was no easy
task.

Eventually, I ended up on Gentoo, a community distribution, in part due to
the aftermath of trying to find an appropriate amd64 version of Mandrake
to purchase, showing my support while *NOT* subsidizing
"masters-over-me-ware". Yes, Gentoo has ebuilds for a lot of
proprietaryware, but I can avoid them (often, they'd require separate
manual downloads anyway), and as a community distribution, I can more
freely contribute, without worrying that any part of my contribution is
subsidizing closed source, except by a most tenuous of indirect threads,
that's very nearly impossible to avoid.

With a lot of distributions, the non-freedomware they ship with the paid
version is one of the big selling points contrasting it to the
downloadable version, particularly for low-cost versions that include
little or no bundled support.

Fortunately and by legal necessity, most at minimum put the slaveryware on
a separate disk, often called the "bonus" disk, or something similar, to
denote it can't be obtained in the downloadable version.

Duncan