[Fwd: Re: Fedora free software?]

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 07:09:38AM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:

 > While talking to some of the Fedora games SIG folks on irc earlier there 
 > was general reluctance to put out a Fedora games spin which I was 
 > advocating for as a show case for all the nice games we have in the 
 > repository . The major reason is that 3D games require proprietary 
 > drivers to function on many systems and having just 2D games wouldn't be 
 > that appealing. If we include 3D games and users can't run them out of 
 > the box in a games spin on many systems that would just appear broken.

Please don't confuse the issues of binary firmware and binary drivers.
The two are *not* the same, and have different issues.

Endorsing binary drivers in any way (no matter how many "you really
shouldn't be doing this" dialogs we throw in the users way) leads
to a support nightmare.  Over the last six months, the number of
users filing kernel bugs tainted with nvidia, vmware and other crap
has been increasing dramatically. (Probably a result of compiz/beryl etc).
I really don't want this to get any worse than it already is.

 > The solution I thought of was having a driver buddy similar to codec 
 > buddy with the major difference that it wont install anything or add 
 > pointers to the location of the drivers but warn/educate users on 
 > alternatives. If they install the spin on systems where we do not 
 > provide have 3D acceleration by default which translates into everyone 
 > of these systems with ATI and Nvidia cards then we provide a quick 
 > notification on their desktop directing to more information pointing on 
 > what chipsets/systems work out of the box in Fedora with full 3D 
 > acceleration which translates mainly to the ones with Intel chipsets.

Popping up notifications like this isn't going to make anyone
think "Oh, ok. I'll rush out and buy a new motherboard/graphics card".

 > Extending this we could do something similar for systems which require 
 > binary only firmware with or without redistribution rights.

What good would this do me if my storage driver needs firmware?
Or I need to download firmware for my network driver?

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk