The race for compatibilty becomes evil

08 06 2008
Most major Linux distribution vendors are trying to push the Linux desktop harder than ever, in my opinion this is mainly due to the new hugely popular subnotebook craze (such as the EeePC).  There is however one major problem to this and that is most open source alternatives to proprietary solutions are not release read yet.

For example, anyone who has wanted to go out and by a wifi dongle for their Linux desktop has had to proceed with caution...or use ndiswrapper with the Windows driver.  If you want flash there are 2 open source solutions, both good but neither support everything.

So vendors have had 2 choices, try and assist development of these open solutions and push a distro that does x, y and z but not a, b and c.  Or do deals with the devil.

Fedora appears to have gone one way (only open source), openSUSE the complete opposite (evil deals with MS) and Ubuntu appears to be somewhere in the middle (including some proprietary drivers and codecs).

My worry is the massive explosion of proprietary additions into a Linux distro to get competitive edge over other vendors could cause the original end goal for Linux to be lost complete.

The question is this:  When does proprietary additions into a Linux distro become evil?
Comments : 2 Comments »
Categories : Linux
Trackbacks : No Trackbacks »
Defined tags for this entry: , , ,
Related entries by tags:
Compare the world
Linux in Cartoons
The Belkin lives!
Ubuntu and our love/hate relationship
KDE 4
Bookmark The race for compatibilty becomes evil at del.icio.us Digg The race for compatibilty becomes evil

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)
07 07 2008
#1 Charles Broam. (Reply)

Compatible to what: Hardware, Software, or Windows User?

I'm a Slackware User, and I may just be on the brink of switching to Arch Linux. If my hardware works with my operating system, that is all I care about. It may take me a little longer to figure out what those steps are to make my OS compatible to hardware, but so be it. MS and their 'proprietary additions' can kiss my ass before they ever get put to use on my machine.
09 07 2008
#1.1 LinuxJedi (Reply)

All of the above. ATi to be fair are going some way into developing an open source driver for their graphics chips. But for many computers you can't (currently) use all your hardware without proprietary add-ons.

A few years ago you wouldn't dream of using proprietary/closed source code in your kernel, but with WiFi chips and graphics chips being exclusively closed source this has completely change, and I think if we are not careful this could do damage to the fundamentals of the Linux philosophy (not to mention making the kernel more unstable).

Likewise many video and audio codecs are closed source (kind of understandable with DRM, but that is another issue entirely). I don't believe there is much working going on to open up / reverse engineer these codecs either.

Windows compatibility at the moment is open source, but with Novell getting priority on a lot of things you will see openSUSE getting an edge on this.

Add Comment


Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA