2010/3/19 Tomasz Sterna <[email protected]>: > Dnia 2010-03-19, pią o godzinie 17:19 +0200, Igor Stoppa pisze: >> > In other words, the Debian Social contract has a good advice: >> > >> > "We will never make the system require the use of a non-free >> component." >> > >> >> Even if that practically makes the display unusable? > > If your hardware vendor chooses to use hardware with no open drivers > available, you're stuck with non-free components. > > But the MeeGo distribution should not depend on any closed component.
OK, so, I've had this argument about closed bits on a device an absurd amount of times in the Mer project. My angle of things were, in those discussions: 1. We have a practical goal, we want to accomplish a open source mobile platform 2. We are willing to compromise on our ideology short-term and in the long-term help hardware vendors towards open source. 3. We understand that a working system with a minimum of closed source bits is more appealing towards potential contributors than a broken system that is fully open. I personally believe that it is better to hold hands with a hardware vendor and show them the strength of a open source community and help them towards workable solutions and open source, than to adapt the stance that it's fully open source or no way. I think an attitude of 'reaching, understanding and working towards open source solutions in the long term' is better than a confrontational attitude of 'open source or nothing, now' at making good citizens of hardware vendors in the open source community. How can this be done in practice? 1. The system which is shared amongst all devices should be fully open source This is comparable to what MeeGo is doing. This is the hardware-agnostic platform all device communities and vendors can work on, collaborate on, etc. 2. Each device has their own hardware adaptation which ideally should be open source We know that the situation in the embedded world does not allow us the luxury of having fully open hardware adaption. However, we should work with hardware vendors to provide proper licensing rights so the community and individual developers can build images using those closed source bits. >From my ideological side: 3. Differentiation should be re-distributable by community, possibly only to the devices it came from I want to be able to build an image with an updated MeeGo base system without losing the applications my device came with, at any point of the future. My N810 doesn't go obsolete as long as the hardware can handle the OS. In these discussions, It was my finding that those willing to compromise were the best to collaborate even in an environment with many different attitudes, devices and approaches - towards the common goal of a open source platform. Regards, Carsten Munk maemo.org distmaster _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
