FC4 or FC5

[Sean]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2006 13:13:19 -0700 (PDT)
BRUCE STANLEY <bruce.stanley at prodigy.net> wrote:

Hey Bruce,

> Sean, don't get me wrong.  I think the GPL has some great merits.
> But,  stop living in a dream world.

It's not a dream world.  It's a world where it's okay to accept the current
limitations.  The people living in a dream world are the people that think
the only thing standing between where we are today and Linux running on 
every desktop is to embrace proprietary software.
 
> Hardware vendors are not going to develop  full functioning drivers and
> then release them to the open source community if this gives their
> competitors an insight as to how to compete against them.
> 
> BSD Unix is still a small fish in the bucket due to similar problems.

So be it.  Perhaps Linux isn't ready for the mass-consumer desktop today,
but so what?

Eventually all the proprietary hardware we're having problems with today
will become standard enough that we can write our own drivers and not rely
on hardware vendors to do so.  For instance video cards give Linux trouble
today because hardware changes so fast that it's hard to create a stable
driver.  But that rate of change just won't continue forever.

It just doesn't make sense to throw away the very thing that makes Linux
so important in order to run on a few more desktops today.

Sean


Sean