Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Arjan van de Ven
2005-12-05T18:34:06Z

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 18:26 +0000, Andrew Walrond wrote:
> On Monday 05 December 2005 10:52, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >
> > a hypothetical doomsday scenario by Arjan van de Ven
> >
>
> Can I ask what prompted your post?

I got one too many hatemails from a "nvidia fanboy" who blamed me for
just about anything wrong in the world.... I fear that most of these
people have no idea why open source drivers matter, or at least what the
consequences are for not caring about drivers being open or not.

>
> >
> > On December 6th, 2005 the kernel developers en mass decide that binary
> > modules are legally fine and also essential for the progress of linux,
>
> Has anyone (influential) actually being toying with this idea? I hope not, but
> if they are, I'd like to know who to lobby...

this part of the "story" is fiction. A lot of the rest is not. There are
already several servers that you can only use with binary modules..
modules only available in full binary form for RHEL and SLES kernels for
example.