Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 2:08 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Why doesn't the Linux kernel community take any deliberate action against proprietary drivers?

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Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 11:31 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (4 responses)

Many influential kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds, have no real problem with proprietary drivers as long as these stick to the interfaces which are declared available to them.

As a matter of principle, it would of course be nicer if all Linux kernel drivers were free (and ideally part of the canonical kernel tree) but the Linux kernel is somewhat removed from the idealist end of the free-software spectrum towards the realist end. If instead of Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman was in charge of maintaining the Linux (RMX?) kernel, things might be different.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 28, 2017 12:36 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Um, I don't think Linus likes NVIDIA either :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
https://www.wired.com/2012/06/torvalds-nvidia-linux/

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Oct 5, 2017 9:27 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

IIRC, this was mostly about their Tegra boards rather than their video card engineers.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 29, 2017 10:19 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (1 responses)

As it happens you don't even need to think in terms of "if". If you want to see what happens when Stallman's way of governance decides how a kernel should be maintained, just look at the stellar speed at which Hurd development moves forward, what blazing performance that kernel provides, and the amazing hardware support it provides.

Yes, things would indeed be different.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 29, 2017 22:26 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I think the absence of proprietary drivers is the least of the HURD's problems. Absence of developers seems to be much more of an issue in practical terms. Also, I don't think that (a) rms is really working on the HURD these days, and (b) the HURD is high on the list of the FSF's priorities given that they can use Linux instead.

Fedora's foundations meet proprietary drivers

Posted Sep 29, 2017 10:20 UTC (Fri) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link]

You mean like this following statement from back in 2008:
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/tab/kernel-driver-statement

Or is there something else we should do other than making it very expensive to keep an out-of-tree driver working successfully?