RBW wrote:
Tracy R Reed wrote:
I've always gotten a strange vibe from the whole
Lindows/Linspire/Freespire thing. This posting on groklaw pretty much
sums up why. And I understand perfectly how Michael Robertson could
completely miss the point because I have seen it happen with my own
eyes. Just like he missed the point when we told him spamming was wrong
back at MP3.com.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424164142296
Hmmmm...
Couple of questions...
Regarding the very last paragraph of the groklaw piece, is the example
of Robertson's Lin/Free-spire even remotely viable as an influence for
other major distros, much less the hard core FOSS distros the would
fork before they drank this Kool-Aid from proprietary influence (not
that I mind the time line hypothetical scenarios of potential problems
because I do agree )?
Should we, given as is pointed out that proprietary drivers come as an
"Extras" CD in current distros, give some credit to companies that
make a clear and open statement that they will support and provide
drivers for Linux while at the same time we generally support the less
featured open source drivers as the default for Linux distros?
This came to mind because I have always thought that credit should be
given to companies that explicitly have a policy to write drivers for
Linux but want to keep some of what they are doing shielded in a tight
competitive arena such as some of the video drivers. Personally I
wouldn't want to use something proprietary that I couldn't later
jettison for a FOSS alternative. I'm curious how my thinking compares
with the list...
RBW
*A real world example of someone with a laptop with the same video chip
as mine but I have never tried the proprietary driver...*
*25 Mar 2006
My Laptop has been Freed*
It's ironic that Chitlesh GOORAH has been posting how to install the
proprietary ATI drivers
<http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2006/03/fc5-ati-or-nvidia-drivers.html>
on FC5. I'm celebrating because FC5's Xorg finally allows me to run
the OSS ATI drivers on my laptop. Only with 2D at the moment because
of bugs with the r300 drivers but at least I've been able to stop
choosing between 1024x768 with the Vesa driver or somewhat unstable
1280x800 with the ATI proprietary driver. Since I was never able to
get 3D acceleration with the proprietary driver, it's no big
surprise that I'm happy to switch.
Other people with my laptop are slowly making headway with the
proprietary drivers
<http://lists.pcxperience.com/pipermail/linuxr3000/2006-March/007550.html>
but with the issues being reported, I don't think I'm missing much :-)
http://www.advogato.org/person/badger/diary.html?start=30
RBW
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