X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules [LWN.net]

X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Posted Aug 15, 2006 22:46 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
Parent article: X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Mike Harris is quoted as having written:

Fedora does not support proprietary drivers at all, and never has, nor has any Red Hat OS that preceded it.

Factually incorrect. Various early retail-box Red Hat Linux releases in the 4.x/5.x timeframe actually did include some proprietary software, including a proprietary X server with integrated drivers for hardware that was not supported by XFree86.

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X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Posted Aug 17, 2006 8:38 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Red Hat have bundled game demos, time limited versions of backup and RDBMS software and lots of other things in the N+1th CD of their boxed Linux distribution, but they don't /support/ any of that stuff.

Are you sure that the X server you're thinking of isn't in the same category? ie "Here's some stuff which runs on Linux, but is not part of Red Hat Linux"

Of course it might be that Mike means specifically kernel drivers...

X.org, distributors, and proprietary modules

Posted Aug 17, 2006 11:32 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

As said by tialrmrmxmrmx, Red Hat never considered their extra CD to be
part of their distribution proper. I have always considered this
something of of a weak argument, myself. However, they have steadfastly
worked at getting rid of the need for nearly every category of such
proprietary software, so I cannot fault their choices too much.