a call to action [Fwd: LWN headline: Blame Fedora = High Praise]

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 09:43 +0530, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
> I would tend to believe that is more the result of a tradeoff between
> convenience and sticking to a distribution's moral and/or ethical
> standpoint. For example, till the time Intel Graphics cards became the
> flavor of the month the company was clubbed in the same evil circle as
> NVidia or even ATI. But with time and sufficient effort invested by
> Intel and the distributions, things have changed. This means that an
> average home user can be asked to get a system that provides reasonable
> bling and yet not have to install binary bl0bs to get them.


I've been the first person to _defend_ Red Hat's stance on Fedora,
including Red Hat's _right_ to _refuse_ to support closed source
drivers.  It's not an option, as I've explained to many people.  I've
been long-labeled a "Red Hat apologist," all the way back to the GLibC 2
change in Red Hat Linux 5, but even more so on the Red Hat(R) trademark,
creation of Fedora(TM), the reason for RHEL and its SLA focus, etc...

The context of "evil" is part of the problem.  There is "being active"
-- that's good -- and then there's "being an activst" -- that's bad.
The latter often causes unnecessary labeling, sometimes quite
inaccurately too.

So Fedora advocates should _not_ throw around the "evil" word.  It not
only sells Fedora wrong, but it shows _ignorance_ in some cases.
Especially for those of us who were involved with the "great Linux
migration" in the EDA/CAM (among other) software industries circa
1997-1999 (long story).  I myself am an engineer who has worked with
many engineers from ATI, Real3D (now Intel), nVidia and many others, and
it's quite frustrating when Fedora advocates don't state factual
information, and look utterly _ignorant_.

Understand, Intel _still_ keeps much of its IP closed, and not available
in their Linux support.  This includes some key, kernel-memory aspects
for their GPUs.  What they've finally done is found a way to provide
elementary OpenGL support without touching that IP.  Unfortunately, some
of those missing components prevent many titles from running.  And no,
I'm not talking about games, but some serious, critical Linux
applications.

Furthermore, as I've regularly had to point out, ATI and nVidia can't
release some of their source code because the IP is held by a 3rd party
-- including IP of Intel itself (which it doesn't include in its
drivers).  nVidia tried several things in the late '90s, including
release of the _full_source_code_ of both their kernel-memory driver and
GLX user-space.  And nVidia was summarily sent "cease'n desist" letters
from several companies, Microsoft, SGI and, yes, even Intel.

What nVidia has decided to do since has been so mis-represented and
mis-contrude, I just ignore many people nowdays.  This includes the fact
that many people say nVidia produces proprietary chipsets, when their
chipset peripheral support has been one of the best in Linux, period.
Heck, even their 2D feature support is probably the best in XFree/Xorg
too, including how many engineers they put on it.  On 3D, they finally
got sick of the "IP minefield," especially since trying to produce open
source drivers (which Intel has finally) would result in many titles
_not_working_.  Even Intel is violating many aspects of IP, because
OpenGL is a major issue.

And despite popular belief, ATI _never_ released 3D drivers, that was
Precision Insight who developed GLX drivers for the ATI R100 (Radeon
7500-8000 series) under contract with the National Weather Service.  And
they were (and still are) quite lacking.

Fedora advocates don't have to "bark back" to make a point.  They just
need to repeat, even like a broken record, "we product a 100%
redistributable distribution with 0% indemnification issues."  Leave it
at that, don't stoop to the "evil" moniker, especially when the
understanding is often from a standpoint of ignorance of real IP issues.

Just my $0.02 from a long-time Linux architect and consultant.  ;)



-- 
Bryan J. Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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        Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution