Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software [LWN.net]

Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2009 10:19 UTC (Tue) by pjm (guest, #2080)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration by epa
Parent article: Shuttleworth: On cadence and collaboration

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.

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Offtopic: on distribution of proprietary software

Posted Aug 11, 2009 19:06 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #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.