Re: namespace support requires network modules to say "GPL"

Romano Giannetti
2007-12-03T08:45:12Z

On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 22:34 -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
> Stephen Hemminger wrote:.
> >>
> > I spoke too soon earlier, ndiswrapper builds and loads against current
> > 2.6.24-rc3. Vmware and proprietary VPN software probably do not. Once again I don't
> > give a damn, but the enterprise distro vendors certainly care.
> ...
>
> Naw, enterprise (or any other) distro vendors shouldn't have any issues here,
> since they can just patch their kernels around any issues.

Please pardon me for jumping in; I am not a kernel developer, but I try
to help with debugging whenever I can (and it's not just hand-waving, I
helped to track down a couple of nasty bugs on MMC or ACPI EC,
recently). And I am an engineer and IANAL, so I wouldn't speak about
laws here. But I think it's not just a distribution's problem.

Unfortunately, I need VMware and ndiswrapper to get work done with my
laptop. It's not the perfect world, but the only alternative is to boot
in XP. So I normally stick with vendors kernels and, when I have time to
"play" with new kernel, I go for it. If ndiswrapper and VMware work,
perfect, I can test extensively the new kernel; if I find problems, I
*know* I have to restart without proprietary modules, try to reproduce,
report back. I did it a lot of times.

What I think is that every time VMware or (worst) ndiswrapper breaks,
the kernel loose an awful lot of testers. In the span of time before
Giri and the VMware team post a patch (-rc1 and -rc4, tipically), my
testing activity is just occasional. And I guess a lot of people is in
the same situation.

These are just my 2cents. I will continue to test new kernels every time
I can, and to use native solutions as often as I can (go, ath5k, go!;
and LabWindows/CVI for Linux, anyone?). But maybe a bit of tolerance can
help everyone...

Back in my hole,

Romano

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