Todd Zullinger wrote:
He did clarify his position years ago in my reading of the emails included in COPYING.modules and some other cursory googling. More importantly, any company that expends vast amounts of effort on something would be foolish not to ensure that they had a firm understanding of the legalities surrounding their actions. They'd be doing wrong by their shareholders at the very least if they didn't.
I looked at this about a year ago because a customer wanted me to make a binary module. It was clear that attitudes had hardened against such things in the past couple of years so I advised them to open it. It went back and forth for a while and in the end they had to open it because due to a technical constraint, the code had to get compiled into the monolithic kernel and not a module, at that point it was clear there was no way for them to go on hoping for a binary.
Even if there hadn't been that forced solution, from what I understand you are asking for a bad situation if you issue binary modules nowadays. (Userland being a whole other issue, Oracle won't be open sourcing their database because it runs on Linux any time soon).
or Dave J.). And that is the point I took from Alan's response to the original post, that is is not really Ubuntu's place to be reaching out to "embarrassed SuSE devs" while they themselves are embracing binary drivers that are a clearly contentious issue among the developers to whom they are reaching out.
The Ubuntu-ite iconoclast brigades probably aren't interested in notions about their place, hence their highly visible profile and vigorous growth. Whatever the faux pas of declasse Ubuntu that may be muttered about behind lacy handkerchiefs it is nothing to the Judas-style seduction of Novell that is calculated to put everything in danger.
-Andy
