On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:12 -0600, David G. Miller wrote: > "Paul Osunero" <esiex3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > The discussion at the dell blog shows that people really want Ubuntu first, > > Fedora second, and Suse third out of the big three. To be honest, Ubuntu > > makes more sense because they'll have legal codecs from Linspire's CNR and > > they have commercial support. Fedora lacks these things right now... > The best thing Dell could do for FOSS would be to offer systems that are > fully supported (hardware) by open source drivers. The point however is that this is _not_ the best thing to do either for the users (who actually need functionality) and the owners of intellectual property rights. Programmers and companies have the right to license their own work the way they see fit, simply because that if by definition it is _their_ work, then it is theirs. Period. They have the right to protect their own work, and if a profit is to be made and they are to get rightful compensation for their ideas, this protection will never be provided by the GPL. GPLv2 is only the right thing for freely given work, not for intellectual property that needs protecting. Up until relatively recently, different licenses co-existed just fine under GPLv2. If a user wanted to load binary drivers, he did; his choice, his machine, his software. His house, his truck, et cetera. The user was the master of his own ideological domain with regards to licensing. But that freedom of choice, both by the user and by the owners of intellectual property rights, is threatened by a kernel message, inserted by Greg KH and Andrew Morton, which says that non-GPL'd licensed drivers will be "disallowed" since they are "tainted". This wasn't a decision that was discussed among the members of the Linux community, it's not something that was voted in by several user populations of different distros, as a matter of fact there was no consultation made to the community at all; it was a decision made behind closed doors by two or more developers, ON YOUR BEHALF. In other words, you, I, nor nobody else except them had any say in this. Since a social mindset leads ultimately to elitism and dictatorship, it's not at all surprising to me that there was no democracy about this. Furthermore, it was not a decision of technical merit, it was an ideological decision, and as I've said before, ideological decisions are the sole purview of the user and not the developer. The developer by definition is to concern himself with the technical merit of existing GPL'd code with which he is associated (as opposed to forcing licensing on the public regarding code he has no rights to). The developer has no right to push ideological views onto the user, the programmers, and the companies, which essentially is what this kernel threat is doing. The key point is that the users are making a statement to the latter right now as we speak by choosing Ubuntu over Fedora. LX -- °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° A Kernel Of Socialism greatunwashed: module license 'great_unwashed' taints kernel. ich: no version for "unwashed_register_device" found: kernel tainted. Symbol usb_register_driver is being used by a non-GPL module, which will not be allowed in the future Please see the file Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt in the kernel source tree for more details. °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
