Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

Alan Cox alan at redhat.com
Sun Nov 21 20:25:19 UTC 2004


On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 08:21:09PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> They won't. Why should they? Availability of source code is useful
> primarily to those who can read and write programs. That's not the
> majority of the worlds population.

Wrong. Simple rephrase   "The availability of plans of the house is useless
except to builders". Now that should be obviously garbage to anyone. Its
useful to you because it means you can pick your builder.  Imagine a world
of "I'm sorry sir you'll have to phone ACME plumbing and pay whatever they
care to charge you because thats a proprietary sink joint." "Can't you work
out what it is doing" "Im sorry sir, it has a no reverse engineering clause"

> They could support kernels with binary only modules. Other OS vendors do
> it. Other open source projects do it. They choose not to however.

If you want any support with certain binary only modules (in limited cases)
buy an enterprise product which is priced appropriately for the problems it
causes,

Alan




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