On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 4:16 AM, Narendra Sisodiya
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Let me put my voice on the biggest hurdle in FOSS adaptation.
> This hurdle is "Proprietary Hardware Drivers"
> In India we recently established a "Open Standard Policy".It is the great
> success of
>FOSS communities and our leaders.
> In the same way we need to have a policy on Hardware selling. This policy
> must specify
>that "Anything which Govt is buying must have a Open Specification of their
>Driver."
>
> Why this is important ?
>
> Let me explain by an example.
> A school from my town has purchased hardware 1 year ago. At the time of
> purchase they
>are not knowing about Linux. Now even If they want to move they have to take
>expert
>consultancy to install Linux. Because many a time some device refuse to work
>with
>GNU/Linux because GNU/Linux do not have proprietary drivers. For example some
>WebCam do not work directly on GNU/Linux or most of the whiteboards which is a
>high
>trend in schools etc.
>
> Dear all FOSS advocates, You need to remember that you can visit a school or
> college
>and try for installing GNU/Linux BUT you can't change hardware from a system.
>We must
>have a clear policy that says - "every device must have a open specification
>or driver for all
>available operating systems".
>
> We seriously need to blacklist proprietary driver and hardware from market
> and stop their
>sell.
> Proprietary hardware is one from of monopoly which is more dangerous then
> proprietary
>software,
>
This needs more of a debate. There are existing hardware compatibility
lists e.g.[1], which serve as advisories, but have limited impact on
policy.
While no one would question the argument that proprietary drivers
pose a severe restriction for widespread FOSS adoption, it is
important to provide space to integrate proprietary drivers if no
viable FOSS drivers are available - at risk to killing FOSS adoption
by allowing only basic features. it is probably a better idea to look
at a white list with a layered acceptance criteria to filter hardware
at procurement.
To seed this discussion I propose that one such layered approach
could be to define a policy such as:
All hardware procured should be (additionally) certified to
demonstrate the integration of all in-built and specified peripheral
devices using all features/functionalities on the device with at least
three community based popular GNU/Linux distributions namely Fedora,
Open-Suse and Debian, through the following criteria
(1) Devices should adhere to the specifications of the Linux Kernel[2]
(AND)
(2) Devices with the source code for the drivers/peripherals released
under GNU GPLv2/3 license
(OR)
(3) In the inability of the manufacturer to release the driver under
the criteria (2) above, the driver should be available in stable and
testing repositories compatible with the above named mainstream
community distributions.[3]
Andrew
Notes
[1] www.linux-drivers.org
[2] Specifications of the kernel are at www.kernel.org. This criteria
needs some inputs to harden against version changes at the kernel. My
feeling is that insisting on device driver compatibility at a point so
far upstream of the distribution would only work for GPL drivers,
[3] At risk of being flamed for this proposal, - I am expanding this
note with an explanation of my stance. My reasons for watering down an
insistence on FOSS drivers for devices is that a few of the best
devices and peripherals - especially dealing with cameras, graphics
cards like Nvidia and printers have drivers that are proprietary.
There are legal issues on why these drivers cannot be opensourced -
e.g. take the case of JAVA , which though announced as open source
three years ago, is still struggling to get a completely feature
compatible open source version. For those of us that have worked with
OpenGL or JAVA, we have not yet been able to rely only on GPL released
versions of drivers for NVIDIA/ATI or the JVM for production use.
However the free availability of these components either through the
manufacturers web-site, and or from non-free repositories, has
permitted easy use of applications dependent on them.
Enforcing a hard-line stance of permitting only open source
drivers maybe counter productive in allowing only crippled versions of
these distributions to run, which would not be an effective show-case
for policy makers, or satisfying experience for end users.
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