[linux-audio-dev] Getting out of the software game
After a few days of careful consideration, I've decided that I no longer want to be involved in developing software for Linux. It's been a difficult decision to make, having used Linux as my main desktop OS for around 10 years now, but I feel that the community as a whole is going in a direction that is not compatible with my moral compass. To that end, I'm pulling everything I've written under the GPL or a GPL-compatible licence. If there are copies out there, great, feel free. Anything I'm interested in will be rewritten from the ground up under a BSD-style licence, which to be honest I've always preferred. Part of the reason for this is the increasing difficulty of using binary drivers with Linux. I know a lot of people don't like them, but I like to have things like accelerated video *and* custom kernels without all the buggering about involved in getting it working. In particular the Debian-based distributions seem to be intentionally hamstrung when comes to supporting binary-only drivers, which makes running the custom kernel required for low-latency work *and* the binary nVidia driver almost impossible. I don't want to be associated with this nonsense any more. It's not what Free Software is about. Gordonjcp
Re: [linux-audio-dev] Getting out of the software game
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 10:21 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: Binary drivers make the kernel impossible to debug, and if the kernel devs created such a DBI, vendors would stop releasing open source drivers and pretty soon Linux would be no more stable than Windows. Why should Linux sacrifice stability just so vendors can keep their hardware interfaces secret? This is exactly what I'm talking about. I *DON'T FUCKING CARE* what the manufacturers do or don't do with their hardware interfaces. What I *do* care about is having X break every couple of days because some kernel update. I have neither the time nor the inclination to try and work round other people's hangups. I flattened my Linux PC, and along with it all the source and svn repository. I only really need Thunderbird, Firefox, Bluefish and gvim to get my real work done, and they work just fine in FreeBSD (and indeed NetBSD, my OS of choice). Anyway, rant over. It's gone now. I'm going back to concentrating on hardware synths and analogue recording. Thanks folks, Gordonjcp
Re: [linux-audio-dev] Getting out of the software game
On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 10:34 -0400, Lee Revell wrote: I think you misread my technical statement as a political one. I don't care about politics or the GPL, I just want Linux to be the most stable OS, and that can't happen if secret blobs of code are allowed to scribble all over kernel memory. Hm. In something like six years of using nVidia cards and their binary drivers, I have never had a problem that could be traced to the driver. Problems and lockups caused by the fan falling to bits are a different matter ;-) Gordon
[linux-audio-dev] Regarding nekobee et al
Firstly, I'd like to apologise for acting like a total arse about this. It wasn't originally my intention to remove the site, but then a slip of the finger with fdisk during my Nth reinstall that day kind of put paid to it. The site and svn repository were backed up the day before, thanks to someone with more foresight than I. After I took the site down I got a surprising number of emails from people who said they quite liked using nekobee, and asking what was happening with it. The polite hey I liked it emails (you know who you are) prompted me to look at getting it back and stop acting like a dick. I also got quite a few really nasty emails which I won't go into lest I incite a (another) flamefest. Suffice it to say that posting You'd better release the source, I know where you live and a copy of my contact details from whois *didn't* encourage me to bring the site back up. It did, however, get forwarded onto Strathclyde Police's Computer Crime Division (or whatever they call themselves). You know who you are, too. Anyway. I don't (really really don't) have time any more to do any audio work on computers. Maybe in a few months that will change, we'll have to see. In the meantime, if anyone would like to take over any of the projects (I've got a couple of experimental things I never bothered to make public, and a few ideas on where to take them), then please email me off-list to discuss it. Gordon
