Francis Earl wrote:
An interface is agnostic to what is on the other side, which is the
point of it being an interface. And going out of your way to not work
with certain others is anticompetitive behavior.
You don't seem to get it, GNU was founded on certain beliefs, and just
because those beliefs are now entering the mainstream does NOT mean
RedHat and other strong believers should reverse their decisions.
It's not a matter of 'getting it'. The mechanism used to enforce the
beliefs are counterproductive to the goals. RedHat, of course has a
huge vested interest in keeping others from being able to add
improvements that they can't also automatically obtain but that's not my
point here.
Take a look at http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Members to see how
anti-competitive Linux is in the tech industry. Anyone that wants in can
contribute and have a say in the direction of it... No one owns Linux,
all you have to do is play by the rules.
But you can't include content already under different restrictions.
There's a lot of that content - some with no legal alternative
replacements possible.
You can't choose to cater/not cater. You either present a usable
interface and give the user the freedom to decide what to put on the
other side, or you don't. The rest is just side effects.
I'll remind you it's ILLEGAL to have non-free code link against GPL
code.
Yes, and that keeps GPL'd code from being used at all in many situations
which is the part I consider counterproductive. The way to oppose
overpriced proprietary software is to make usable replacements for as
much of it as possible - which necessarily involves using it with code
under different restrictions for as long as there are no free
alternatives. Instead, the license forces users to continue to use all
non-free code since they can't be mixed.
The price you pay for that is that you get drivers a little late,
No, code covered by copyright can be replaced by alternative versions,
although in the driver case it is generally written by someone with less
incentive to make it work than what the vendor would provide. However,
in any location where software patents are recognized you can't have any
algorithm covered by a patent until it expires or someone buys it and
releases it for free redistribution.
The scary part here is that no one really knows how much software is
patented, or how broadly the claims might be interpreted. Even if we
accept on faith that no one has intentionally duplicated any patented
techniques into Linux, there's no reason to think that they haven't
gotten there by accident as a matter of duplicating needed functionality.
oh well. Windows users have been perfectly fine using a system that
doesn't even support their hardware out of the box.
Windows doesn't change its driver interface on a monthly basis, so users
have no problem getting and installing a vendor-provided driver that
normally continues to work for the life of their machine. That scheme
is not a problem.
No one is suing ATI
or Nvidia, but they are some of companies not abiding by the rules.
If their software uses components already under different restrictions
they can't possibly abide by the law while releasing under GPL terms.
DRI
is working as fast as they can though to create a good story despite
that.
Video drivers are a tiny part of this problem.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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