Fedora - DELL ?

[Lyvim Xaphir]

On Wed, 2007-03-14 at 23:12 -0600, David G. Miller wrote:
> "Paul Osunero" <esiex3 at gmail.com> 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.
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