FC4 does not work, "out of the box" for me; GUI/X11 fails

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 13:21 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 11:53, Craig White wrote:
> 
> > > I like open source, but it should be a matter of choice whether you
> > > give your work away or not.  We need a way to let them keep that
> > > freedom of choice while still being able to use their product. They
> > > are going to a great effort trying to give away free binaries yet
> > > the OS distribution continues to make it difficult for them.
> > ----
> > I thought that commitment to open source and not distributing software
> > with restrictive licensing to be a virtue.
> 
> It's a religion. Attempting to force others to give away their
> work doesn't agree with mine.  Choosing to give away your work
> is fine, but if it isn't your choice it can't be much of a virtue.
> You can pick your own religion, but if you are going to justify
> it to others, pick some real examples and follow them through.
----
I don't think anyone is forcing anybody to do anything. Open source and
non-restrictive licensing seems to offer a pretty large opening for
those who wish to be invited to the dance.
----
> 
> >  That puts pressure on those
> > who want to come to the dance to dress according to the rules.
> 
> People pushing their religion on others has often caused problems...
> The big problem here is that the GPL concept makes it next to
> impossible to fairly spread the development cost of something
> new over the appropriate set of users. 
----
assuming of course that the body of work that is already open source
that gets you as far as it has doesn't already have a value far in
excess of the development cost of something new (as you put it), I would
agree with you but of course, I am not willing to do that. I suspect
that people who contribute to an open source (GPL type license) project
assume a quid pro quo of others to do the same on other projects but of
course, there is no guarantee.

Where you are discussing corporate product where they are unwilling to
release the source under a reasonably non-restrictive license, which
they have every right (if not corporate responsibility to their
shareholders), they can of course make their code available in binary
form to be installed post Linux distribution install and that's hardly a
problem except they also accept the burden for making it happen whereas
the burden shifts to the distribution developers if it is released with
source and non-restrictive license. The choice of course is theirs to
make.

One would surmise by your comments is that your complaint is with the
restrictions on the GPL license itself and I'm thinking that this is
hardly the place to debate that.
----
> 
> > I don't want to dis on Adobe/Real Networks/nVidia/ATI/Sun et al. They
> > have every right to hold on to their source and only distribute binaries
> > for free as they wish, they just don't get included with source only
> > distributions. 
> 
> Source makes sense for things of general interest where a lot of
> people will work to improve it.  Device drivers should be written
> once by someone who understands the hardware and never touched again.
----
Until you have a device that is dropped from the distribution but still
in the generic kernel - I know this first hand...I have a Perc 2/DC in
my server running on CentOS 4
----
> If you poke around, I think you'll see lots of examples of
> source-available drivers that were done by one, and only one person.
> In the unfortunate case of that person's demise or change of interests
> they were abandoned or languished a long time before anyone else
> picked them up.
----
and if the source is available, at least someone can pick it up. What's
the point?

Craig


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