14 Mar
2007
14 Mar
'07
5:47 p.m.
I think you misread my technical statement as a
political one. I
don't care about politics or the GPL, I just want Linux to be the most
stable OS, and that can't happen if secret blobs of code are allowed
to scribble all over kernel memory.
I have an additional argument against binary drivers. Some years ago,
we had a server with a Highpoint IDE RAID controller. We bought it
because the Highpoint actually had an "open source driver" tgz for it
on it on its webpage. It turned out though that this "open source
driver" was a binary blob with some "open source" kernel glue code
around it (just like the nvidia and ati drivers). Anyway, too late to
go back, we used the controller with the binary driver, kernel 2.4.
After a while had to to upgrade to a 2.6 kernel, but Highpoint only
provided a 2.4 driver. This caused a lot of trouble.
Needless to say, from that moment on, we have sticked with IDE
controllers from manufacturers that truely support open source. And
with software RAID.
That said, I do use the nvidia binary drivers. NVidia follows kernel
changes fast enough, and my experience is that you will not run into
trouble if you using a (custom) kernel that is not totally cutting edge.
I use Ubuntu, and using the NVidia drivers with it is pretty
straightforward. So I really do not understand how this can make someone
decide to stop developing software for Linux.
maarten