Re: [PATCH] Blacklist binary-only modules lying about their license

Gene Heskett
2004-04-30T21:07:06Z

On Friday 30 April 2004 12:20, Timothy Miller wrote:
>Helge Hafting wrote:
>> Timothy Miller wrote:
>>> While we're on all of this, are we going to change "tained" to
>>> some other less alarmist word? Say there is a /proc file or some
>>> report that you can generate about the kernel that simply wants
>>> to indicate that the kernel contains closed-source modules, and
>>> we want to use a short, concise word like "tainted" for this.
>>> "An untrusted module has been loaded into this kernel" would be
>>> just a bit too long to qualify.
>>>
>>> Hmmm... how about "untrusted"? Not sure...
>>
>> "Unsupported" seems a good candidate to me. It describes the
>> situation fairly well. Such a kernel is unsupported by the
>> kernel community, and probably by the binary module vendor
>> too. They tend to restrict support to their own module . . .
>
>GOOD! And if people misunderstood "unsupported" to also mean that
> the VENDOR doesn't support it either, that's fine, because it's
> almost always true. :)
>
I'm on this side of the fence too. There are some vendors whose gear
I will not knowingly buy, memorex being one of them after I got a
device damaged by a power surge from nearby lightning, and was
summarily told by the telephone support dweebs that they did NOT
support linux, and that my warranty was worthless if it was ever
hooked to a linux box. Hieing myself back to the dealer, he tried it
on a windows box, and it indeed was broken as far as the passthru was
concerned, but it almost made a picture so that was good enough for
them and I was told to go piss up a rope.

We should, and really, no dis-respect for Marc is intended here,
demand that the drivers furnished for linux be 100% open source.

I have an nvidia card, but run the nv driver for exactly that reason.

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--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.