Re: [SLE] Re: And another 10.1 showstopper

Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Thursday 01 June 2006 02:38, Rajko M wrote:
If driver is bad and part of the kernel than it will crash whole system
(are you old enough to remember BSOD times). To make use of such driver
someone has to debug it. Do you think that any of hardware vendors will
ever try to ask MS to debug device drivers without giving technical
specs and source code?

Uhhh your point is valid however..... in 10.1, in trying to use the radeon driver built by the kernel developers (I would assume since it was distributed with 10.1), the driver hung my entire system everytime it switched into graphics.

So why am I better off using all non-foreign code??

Code is code.... and it works or it doesn't. Gee, maybe we need a "Linux Certified" sticker to put on any non-gpl code and then we can use it. :-)


Hi Bruce,

I can't say that open source, including device drivers, is better just because it is open source. I want as anybody else working code/binaries.

There are two groups of problems with proprietary device drivers:
1) Technical:
Who can maintain/debug program with hundreds of variables that control complex devices without knowing a lot about hardware and having source code for device driver.

2) Legal:
- Who can unscramble license agreements that come with non-open part of the code. One can easily agree to something that will prevent him from further participation in open source projects, or hire lawyer to check the contract.

For kernel developers there was one way out of this maze and they used it. Insisting on GPL is not matter of some irrational purity, it is the way avoid legal problems.

Vendors can write drivers that will run in user space like X server. Why is good to have drivers in user space is explained here:
http://lwn.net/Articles/66829/

One possible solution for vendors showed Conexant (modems). Making agreement with Linuxant they have Linux driver that is self financing operation.

--
Regards,
Rajko.

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