nvidia

[Anders Karlsson]

Thus, Lamar Owen at Tue Oct 30 20:20:08 2007 inscribed:
[snip]
> What Les would like is a Fedora on a more stable (as in driver/module INTERNAL 
> API).
> 
> The discussion always seems to morph here, for some reason.  CentOS/RHEL 
> provide API stability (in general) across the entire OS, down to the version 
> numbers.  Fedora doesn't provide this, for any package, including the kernel.  
> The kernel's module/driver INTERNAL interface changes regularly, sometimes 
> for no good reason it seems.  
> 
> This is an upstream kernel development problem, not a Fedora one.

Agreed, which is why I earlier in the thread suggested that the
discussion would be better off on the LKML, where the kernel people
that makes those decisions could explain it to the people arguing the
point about this.

> I too get quite aggravated by this.  No, just because I choose to run a few 
> proprietary modules in the kernel (in my case, it's all vmware stuff) does 
> not mean at all that I shouldn't run Linux, or even Fedora, for that matter.  
> Perhaps I'm not even running VMware for the reasons you think I am?  

Your reason for running VMware is not something that I care much
about. When you require support for a kernel crash, I'd expect you to
be asked to remove the proprietary, closed sourced, drivers/modules
and reproduce before re-reporting a problem. This is just common sense
really.

> FOSS and proprietary software are not and will not be mutually exclusive, 
> despite some folks misplaced idealism.

There is a distinction to be made. When you talk about proprietary,
closed source, drivers - then people should be aware that they not
just may, they *will*, get strong reactions.

I hear what you are saying though.

-- 
Anders Karlsson <anders at trudheim.co.uk>
All-Round Linux Tinkerer & RHCE