On 7/28/05, Roy T. Fielding <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jul 28, 2005, at 10:47 AM, Mike Kupfer wrote: > > > What about things like wifi drivers? I'm not an expert in the area, > > but > > I'm told that these drivers often contain a binary-only component (even > > in Linux). It's apparently the result of US (FCC) regulatory > > requirements on the wifi hardware. > > Then they aren't in OpenSolaris. Not being in our products > doesn't mean they can't be downloaded from somewhere else or > obtained as part of a proprietary distribution.
I don't think that's a very practical view. There is a *lot* of hardware out there that cannot be used without some binary component. Not just wifi, but many others. Quite frankly, it should be more about the user and less about ivory tower academic principles. Taking the attitude of "open source only or the highway" sounds very noble, but it doesn't accomplish much. Many companies *will never* provide the necessary information to develop drivers for their hardware, whether because of legal obligations to others, *government restrictions*, or otherwise. I think many people are looking at the OpenSolaris project as one that is willing to support the user instead of taking the rather unhelpful attitude of "no binary drivers" that other operating system projects take. When it comes down to it, the user doesn't give a flying pig about whether a driver is binary only or not. They just want their hardware to work, and if binary only components is the only choice then it's a reasonable thing to accept to many of us. Those who don't like it can just not use that hardware, the rest of us would like our hardware to work out of the box :) -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
