Re: [LI] Re: Fwd: Linux headed for disaster? >> My thoughts <<

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 02:06:56PM +0530, C Hanish Menon wrote:
> 
> Thus I can sum up this persons mail as a mearly COMMERCIALY MOTIVATED stuff
> than anything else.

Your points about the advantages of having an open source driver are very
valid. Much newsprint has been dedicated to it already.

But there are situations under which people want to preserve their
intellectual properties. And they should be free to do so. XFree86 4.0
is being smart here in defining a binary interface. So if a graphic
chip vendor wants to release a binary only driver, I can use it with
XFree86 4.0. Sure it may not work as well as a source only driver, but
it's better than nothing.

Using GPL to pry open unwanting people's IPs and then gloating over
the righteousness of doing so is pretty amusing to me.

As I said on more public forums, I don't think this is a technical decision
at all. This is politics. This is why I'm coding for FreeBSD these days.

Binary drivers don't work always, but as Windows, Solaris and
UnixWare have demonstrated, a large majority of the drivers can be made
to work.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/udi.html on what happens when people
try to come up with new standards for interoperability. If the GNU
project was as big as it is today when POSIX was standardized, I'm sure
they would've said - oh! we don't want POSIX, because it helps Microsoft
implement it on NT and use GNU/Linux software.

I've had enough of this.

	-Arun