I think a much more important implication of the KDE debacle is what problems the GPL might make now that Linus is allowing proprietary drivers to be loaded into the kernel. Isn't this effectively the same as linking against a library?
And even if it isn't, what are we going to do if proprietary drivers become common? We'll have a main dist that is useless on a lot of computers. I think Debian should take a stand against proprietary drivers and only distribute kernels with the proprietary driver code removed. I mean people were worried about the proprietary QT becoming a standard on Linux - I think a much more worying prospect for Linux (and the free software community as a whole) is having Linux boxes that won't function *at all* without proprietary drivers! Debian can have a lot of influence with this (linux journal rated us as second most popular dist) and Red Hat seems to be like minded on these matters, so we can probably rely on them too. What does everyone think? Do we give Linus a good spanking? -- Matthew Parry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.bowerbird.com.au/people/mettw/> - "There now, didn't I tell you to keep a good count? Well, there's and end of the story. God knows there's no going on with it now." - Sancho Panza.
