Contributions [LWN.net]

Contributions

Posted Sep 12, 2009 15:05 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Contributions by trasz
Parent article: Microsoft launches open source foundation (Linux-Watch)

Fine, drivers were not the best example in the world; after all there are lots of proprietary drivers for Linux and there is little we can do about it except complain.

But even so: your analogy is again biased. If we are speaking about companies basing their operating systems on Linux, I would say that the situation is rather:

Now, look at the situation in Linux. Red Hat (a $1B company) contributes drivers to Linux. Intel (a $30B company) contributes drivers to Linux. IBM, Novell contribute code to Linux. Manufacturers (Realtek, Broadcom) contribute drivers to Linux. About 194 companies contributed just to the last kernel iteration.

All these companies gave plenty back to Linux. And the code is there for everyone to see, share and expand upon. Other developers (closed or free) can reimplement them with a different license or for another language. Meanwhile, Apple (another $30B company) contributes nothing back to nobody since their code is opaque. Except of course when they feel like it. And BSD enthusiasts feel they are not parasitic.

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Contributions

Posted Sep 13, 2009 18:49 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> Fine, drivers were not the best example in the world; after all there are lots of proprietary drivers for Linux and there is little we can do about it except complain.

Well actually... Name off all these proprietary drivers?

The only one that people can't seem to do without, right now, would be Nvidia's proprietary drivers. That and some GSM stuff for mobile phones.

Otherwise it's pretty damn easy to do avoid proprietary drivers altogether and yet find inexpensive and high performing hardware for everything you'd want to do.

The main reason why people run proprietary drivers today, other then to get away from Linux/X.org poorly performing, overly complex, and archaic driver models, is because they did not pay enough attention when buying their hardware.

Contributions

Posted Sep 13, 2009 19:14 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

There are proprietary drivers for many pieces of hardware: graphics cards, wireless cards, even for the NSLU2's wired interface. Sure, sometimes there are free equivalents which may or may not have the same functionality; but the thing is that the GPL has not stopped proprietary drivers from sprouting all around, despite Linus' clarification.