On 12/11/2007, Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith at sun.com> wrote: > Shawn Walker wrote: > >> Software that didn't meet those rules (closed source binaries, NDA covering > >> ARC review) could still be installed on the distro, but couldn't be a core > >> part of it. > > > > I disagree with this for the reasons I listed above. Good work and > > drivers shouldn't be excluded as long as sufficient redistribution > > rights are available for them. We don't want to handicap ourselves > > just to be able to claim "100% open source." > > Do we want to be able to have a reference distro that can be easily ported to > new platforms (PowerPC, Itanium, or whatever else people want) or one that is > limited to the existing platforms due to core closed binaries?
I think that's too fine of a line; if you leave the drivers out simply because they could apply to other platforms you end up "punishing" the users of those other platforms (possibly) just because of their choice of platform. The existence of closed drivers (due to legal or whatever reasons) shouldn't discourage other platforms from providing them if applicable. However, some things will likely never apply to other platforms as you have indicated. For example, Inte Wireless drivers or Video chipset related "blobs" will likely never apply to PowerPC or SPARC :) > Perhaps a middle ground of allowing closed drivers for specific hardware that > isn't as likely to be of interest to other platforms would allow for both > portability to other platforms and being able to run as much hardware as > possible on selected platforms. In the end, I think perhaps the best thing is to strongly encourage everything to be as open as possible and, at the very least, freely redistributable for derivative distributions. To fit with that, a specific justification and reasoning about why a particular closed component is included should be documented and available publicly. Ta, -- Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/ "We don't have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types--in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor..." --Larry Wall
