Whats with the petty Open Source Pureness that has killed PWCX

John Morris jmorris at beau.org
Tue Aug 31 02:40:26 UTC 2004


On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Listman wrote:

> We are all being shafted in this one. For those of you like me that have
> experienced high quality video courtesy of PWCX.....
> 
> What is next, don't allow nvidia driver to load?

Not at all.  But expecting closed source drivers to get distributed in the
official kernel is silly.  Properly understood your question inverts to
"Why doesn't Linus include the Nvidia module with the kernel?" and the
answer is obvious.  And yes it is logically equivilent since the kernel
module for the NVidia driver is open source (or was back when I bought
Nvidia's closed crap.) but is only useful to interface to the closed
source X module.  The pwcx driver was pretty much useless (160x120 max
res) without the closed source addon so should NOT be in the mainline
kernel.  Nothing would have stopped the maintainer from offering the
closed source pwcx driver as a standalone module just like the winmodem
drivers, the ati & nvidia video drivers, the vmware kernel modules, etc.

But if you have been following along, yes recent Fedora (FC2's shipping
package) kernels DIDN'T allow the Nvidia driver to load because the
underlying internals had changed.  Because nobody in the Free Software
World really cares about closed drivers, because we don't use them.  
Nvidia eventually caught up and again, nobody actually writing code cares.  
Closed software is, for the most part, something that happens "Somewhere
else."

Me, I ain't quite as orthodox as the RMS on the issue, I avoid closed
drivers like the plague but when all else fails I will use one.  
Winmodems for example, since there are no Free drivers and due to patents
probably never will be.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
Geekcode 3.1:GCS C+++ UL++++$ P++ L+++ W++ w--- Y++ b++ 5+++ R tv- e* r






More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list