Re: [SLE] Re: And another 10.1 showstopper

On Wednesday 31 May 2006 00:02, Ken Schneider wrote:
Now this idea of removing all this non-GPL stuff.... what was
gained by
that? And that is a Novell-only decision, right?

Actually it was the kernel devs that dictated it, they didn't ask it to
be so they made it mandatory.

Then how in heck is Linux ever going to become a mainstream operating
system
when the kernel can't have proprietary code hung off of it and the
vendors
aren't that interested in developing proprietary code to begin with?
Where
do they think this is going to lead?

Very interesting - and scary - developments. I had read about how Novell
was planning on de-coupling the non-GPL kernel-level drivers from the
system and wondered what effect this would have.

I honestly don't see where in the GPL that having a non OSS chunk
compiled in is a violation. From what I've understood, the GPL simply
states that one can't take a GPL'd piece of code and make it non-GPL. It
would seem to me that Novell, RedHat, Ubuntu and Joe's Cool Distro would
have the freedom to put whatever driver they want in their distro as
long as copyright laws aren't broken.

I've read that Fedora 5 - which I haven't installed - has the same issue
with their unhooking of the drivers.

I'm wondering why RedHat and Novell didn't simply wait a few releases
until a better solution was worked out before decoupling the drivers.
That would have made much more sense that pissing of hundreds or
thousands of end users. From what I understand - in addition to not
being shipped with the distros, the drivers will now break every time a
kernel update is performed. It would seem that some solution where the
kernel simply hooks to a vendor-supplied driver would be preferable.
That driver could be VGA or ATI or Nvidia or whatever.

Isn't that what a HAL is for?

So essentially we have two choices - either Novell and RedHat and Ubuntu
and whomever decide how to put working Non-GPL drivers into the
distribution so that we can have our eye-candy or Linux will be forever
relegated to the server farm.

This sucks.

(Yes folks, that is my highly-academic evaluation of the situation.)


DLL's anyone?

w00t! Visual C++ for Linux using the MFC!

Let me break out my Visual Studio 6.0 CD and fire it up. I?m thinking
maybe if we have a small kernel ? let?s call it kernel386.exe ? and then
a HAL for the hardware ? we?ll call it hal.dll ? we should get something
going. If I then put a posix-compliant subsystem on top of it, I should
then name it ? win32k.sys.

Hmm?maybe I have something here?.I?m going to name the new OS ? Scenery.

--
kai


--
Check the headers for your unsubscription address
For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@xxxxxxxx
Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com
Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@xxxxxxxx

Relevant Pages