Kevin Carmony Responds to Criticism

sharkscott writes to tell us that LXer's Don Parris took a few minutes to get Kevin Carmony's response to the large amount of criticism he has been taking over offering non-free software in Linspire. From the article: "Essentially, Carmony's position is that, in ten years of holding out, the FOSS community has made relatively few gains, in terms of convincing vendors to release libre codecs and drivers. In other words, the strategy doesn't seem to be working. Additionally, while some will be patient, most users would prefer to have something - anything - that works in the meanwhile."

Continuing Discussion

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

To repost my response to Mr. Paris on the L4C mailing list:

I honestly don't understand why Pamela got into such a tizzy over Linspire. The entire point of OSS is to allow forking. The OSS software Linspire is using (and sharing) was released by its owners with the understanding that others would use it for both commercial and non-commercial uses. And they were fine with that. All they required was that changes to *their* code be returned to the public. Anything that the licensee creates separately is his own.

Now that Linspire is taking advantage of that, we're supposed to get worked up about it? Why? If you don't want to contribute, don't contribute. Ignoring the project will kill it far faster than drawing attention to it.

I have a lot of pet peeves against Michael Robertson (not the least of which is his tendency to greatly exaggerate),. but I don't hold a grudge against the guy. If he wants to share his software with the world while keeping parts proprietary, that's his business. All I ask is that Linspire doesn't lay any Intellectual Property traps for unsuspecting souls. It should be clear who owns what and what permissions are given.

Note that Mr. Paris pointed out to me that Robertson stepped down as CEO. Carmony is running the show now. (Just in case you pay as little attention to Linspire as I do.)

My point still holds, though. There's nothing "wrong" with what Linspire is doing with the Freespire project. They're giving away free binaries (which they don't have to give you) along with all the source code they owe you. In exchange, you may or may not become a Click and Run [wikipedia.org] customer. I don't see an issue here. And no, I don't think that Linspire is really expecting a huge outpouring of volunteer programmers, either.

On another topic (since I can't make fun of poor Mr. Robertson's Linspire work anymore), has anyone noticed the latest from AJAX Launch [ajaxlaunch.com]? It seems that they have added an Excel "Demo" (a pretty bit of XUL that looks like a real spreadsheet), a media player that seems no more sophisticated than the one in sharkscott's link in the summary (if I wanted your website to make noise... grrr...), and a RealPlayer video of the "AJAX Desktop" of the Future.

Are you amazed yet? Ecstatic? Hopping up and down in excitement? Holding your breath in bated anticipation?

No, neither am I. :-P

Re:Continuing Discussion

[vga_init (589198)]

All they required was that changes to *their* code be returned to the public. Anything that the licensee creates separately is his own.

Even though the licenses of the software you mentioned permit this, bear in mind that this is not characteristic of Free software, something that GNU and the FSF are very dedicated to. Since GNU/linux is the most popular implementation of their system, naturally you're going to have a large user base that prescribes to the philosphy behind Free software. Even if you don't like hearing complaints from them, it's bound to happen. :)

Re:Continuing Discussion

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

Even though the licenses of the software you mentioned permit this, bear in mind that this is not characteristic of Free software

Nonsense. Not only does the license explicitly separate your programs from GPLed programs (as opposed to the "viral" view), Stallman has repeatedly stated that he has no issues with software being sold or used commercially. If Linspire is going to provide you with access to commercial software AND users are willing to pay for it, then more power to them.

Sure, Linspire may not have bought 100% into the GPL philosophy, but that's not the point. The point is that the GPLed software they're still adhering to the GPL principles by sharing any and all maintenance. If they fix a bug, they have to share it. If they add a new feature, they have to share it. If they decide to try a completely different direction, they still have to share it. Thus the Linux software grows, even if it fails to incorporate CNR or MPEG4. Both of those are matters for other [atekon.de] GPL projects [xvid.org] to encourage freedom in.

This is true even if they don't otherwise want to make their software free. As Stallman said [gnu.org]:

The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular. So we needed to use distribution terms that would prevent GNU software from being turned into proprietary software. The method we use is called "copyleft".(1)

The central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions--but not permission to add restrictions of their own. Thus, the crucial freedoms that define "free software" are guaranteed to everyone who has a copy; they become inalienable rights.

For an effective copyleft, modified versions must also be free. This ensures that work based on ours becomes available to our community if it is published. When programmers who have jobs as programmers volunteer to improve GNU software, it is copyleft that prevents their employers from saying, "You can't share those changes, because we are going to use them to make our proprietary version of the program."

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's...

If...

[xx_toran_xx (936474)]

If Linux proponents expect to see any sort of growth in desktop Linux usage, they are going to have to back down on this issue. Users want their MP3s to play. They want their videos to play. They don't want to deal with some complicated installation procedure just to get basic functionality that they can get easily, out-of-the-box in an install of another operating system.

Linspire realizes this, so they're doing all they can to make it easy as they can for new Linux users to use Linux and do what they want. People shouldn't be giving them flack for this.

Re:If...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Except you've entirely missed the point of an open source operating system. By the death of a thousand pin-pricks, Linux may soon depend so much on closed code that a great number of the advantages it presents over closed operating systems like MS Windows will largely evaporate. You will either have a flakey system of dubious security that frequently breaks on OS upgrades due to dated drivers, or Linux will be locked into outdated but unchangable kernel schemes, for fear of breaking it's hordes of proprietary device drivers.

Re:If...

[RedWizzard (192002)]

The point of an operating system is to enable the user to get their stuff done. It doesn't matter if it's an open source OS or a closed source OS, if it fails that primary requirement then it's worthless to the user. Some stuff is currently not doable using only open source software.

Re:If...

[Arker (91948)]

You're completely missing the point.

The point is, look at what you pay for the software. Not just in monetary terms.

Nvidia doesn't need to put a backdoor in their driver for the cost of it to be too high, because the known cost, without that, is still the users freedom. Their freedom to study how their system works. Their freedom to change how it works, or hire someone to change it for them. The freedom to run WHATEVER OS on it you choose. Sure, they're releasing linux drivers, for now. How's that help you if you want to run BSD? Or Plan9, or BeOS, or anything else? It doesn't. It may not even work when the next kernel comes out.

At the most basic level, it takes away the customers ability to control the hardware they've bought and paid for, even if it doesn't have any unwanted features.

There are plenty of practical problems that go along with that, statistically speaking. More bugs, yes, but more importantly a helplessness against the bugs. If your video driver is buggy and crashing your system, or worse, there are many people out there with the expertise to help debug it - but if that driver is blobware they can't help you. You're reduced to complete dependence on the vendor - who probably doesn't even think of you as a customer. Their customers are other big companies - you are a commodity to them. If you don't want to be that, you have to insist on keeping your freedom.

Now, as to what you were talking about, of course bugs and malware can be inserted in free code - but not nearly as easily, and of course bugs and malware can be detect in unfree blobs - but not near as easily. If that's your only concern, you're an 'open source' person, and that's fine, you still don't want blobware.

But the issues here are much deeper than the practical - the philosophical is much more important, the practicalities are ultimately reflections of the philosophies we live by, consciously or unconsciously. If you don't mind being a commodity that big corporations buy and sell - an 'eyeball' to the media companies and advertisers, for instance, rather than a customer, then I guess you won't mind having no control of the computer hardware you use either. You'll be happy with the blobware running your computer on behalf of its maker, and all their real customers that they sell you to. It'll get you clippy, and hassle-free hollywood movies, and endless britney spears videos, so why should you care if it means your computer really belongs to MS and is for sale to the highest bidders?

That's the issue here, at the core. Everything else follows from it, even the practicalities, because they're a simple consequence of the fact that freedom works. But even if it didn't work so well, some of us would still insist on keeping it.

Linux supports mp3, but that's not the issue

[MarkByers (770551)]

The distro I use, Gentoo, lets you play mp3s easily. In fact most Linux distributions do. I don't think it's a controversial issue that people want interoperability with their closed format files.

But that's not the issue people have with Linspire.

Re:If...

[by Anonymous Coward]

You mean, rather than trying to get manufacturers to release their specs, we should just throw in the towel and wave the white flag.

Frankly, the manufacturers don't seem to be suffering. What are you going to use as leverage?

Linux Incompatibility List

[DavidNWelton (142216)]

A couple of years ago, the 'Linux Incompatibility List' was created to track stuff that doesn't work with Linux:

http://www.leenooks.com/ [leenooks.com]

It may not be much, but it has the advantage that it points out what to avoid, and it's community maintained - with all the hardware out there these days, no one person can know about it all.

The OSS team needs to realise...

[by Anonymous Coward]

...that the _real world_ does not share their view that politics is the most important thing in software... Functionality is...

And more power to them!

[EnronHaliburton2004 (815366)]

This is the first I've heard of this situation involving Linspire. All I can say is, "Sounds good!"

I can't believe how many times I have been stymied when configuring Linux because it didn't support my major-vendor video card. The "Open Source" version of certain drivers don't work. I tried an OSS implementation of some Nvidia drivers and it could barely spit out any video at all, much less allow me to use the advanced options on the card. I know the OSS developers tried hard, and I appreciate that. However, it just didn't work.

At times like these, I don't really care about politics or philosophy. I'm just trying to get the computer working, and if I get stuck because of OSS, I'll just abandon the project.

I suppose this is the reason why I haven't been a serious user of any Linux Desktop software for years. I use Linux as a server all the time, on dozens of different machines. It works great as a Server.

Why the strategy isn't working...

[by Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, there has been little to no success getting vendors to release documentation to write drivers for three major reasons:

1) To date, the market share represented by open-source operating systems is very small.

2) The users and distributors of opensource operating systems have not presented a united front when it comes to the inclusion of propriety drivers and code. In fact, it seems the vast majority of distributors and users are more than willing to settle for closed, propriety drivers (even when they are crap!)

3) American corporate culture reflexively resists voluntarily releasing information of any kind. It is always easier to say no. Some Taiwanese vendors, for example, have been found by some opensource projects to be rather cooperative when it comes to releasing information. Major American corporations by constrast are a guaranteed stonewall.

Closed source sucks.

[rice_burners_suck (243660)]

Being that we produce real time systems for control, we have a company policy that ALL software we use for development, and all libraries that we license for use in our products, must either come with 100% source code that we can build ourselves, or be developed in-house. This is because, after decades of problems with products and libraries that didn't come with source, our management decided that it would rather take longer to get products to market than suffer the problems and subtle unfixable bugs that are caused by closed source software.

We believe that the only way the world can successfully advance in the field of computer software is by eventually replacing all closed source systems with open source ones.

Take an example of Apple's recent success with Mac OS X. This software, although it contains tons of closed source code, is based on open source code and contains literally hundreds and hundreds of free software packages. Apple would never have succeeded in creating such a feature-rich operating system in the time it took to make it without the availability and use of such open source code.

This is why this Linspire debacle is happening. People know that although the expedient thing to do is to continue using closed source proprietary stuff, the correct thing to do is to get ourselves off that addiction and on to some better software.

BSD by comparison

[mshurpik (198339)]

Last week's Slashdot article on Theo de Raadt [kerneltrap.org] was about how he's not using binary drivers.

It had better be sandboxed.

[r00t (33219)]

Ever try writing a 1 to the /proc/self/seccomp file? That blocks everything except read/write on already-open file descriptors, exit, and some stuff for returning from signal handlers. On x86, the cycle counter is disabled too.

The alternative is an extremely strict SE Linux policy, but seccomp is probably better for this job. One could use both at the same time I suppose.

I don't want some spyware crap telling Sony/Microsoft/Real/Sorensen about everything I do and probably acting as a backdoor.

Groklaw

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that this response was motivated (at least in part) by the effort of PJ at Groklaw. For those that have visited recently, PJ did a scathing article on Linspire/Freespire. Really harsh stuff which a lot of people found pretty unwarranted. Myself included.

So I posted anonymously as I usually do. The odd thing that happened to me was that I found my post deleted. So I posted again ... deleted. Then it descended into farce.

She seemed convinced that this was an orchestrated attack by Linspire "astroturfers". And when Kevin posted to the forum, she wouldn't talk to him and asked him for an apology from the (imaginary, IMHO) astroturfers. Having said that, Kevin did quote an email he sent PJ which I thought was poor form.

Anyway, I literally sat there for ages watching post after post being deleted which I thought was amazing. A large number of these posts were quite sensible. They just didn't tow the Groklaw line.

When it had calmed down a couple of days later, I posted that here is a place where they discuss free speech, but don't practice it. Quite frankly, the amount of groupthink and censorship I saw left me with a very different opinion of the place.

The best thing about Slashdot's comment system is that it keeps all the posts. Even the trolls.

I respect intellectual properly scrupulously.

[Ivan Matveitch (748164)]

I always play my MP3s with a legitimate, patent-licensed player. After I download them from eDonkey.

Why can't we all just get along?

[hansreiser (6963)]

Kevin and Michael are both incredibly nice guys who have a particular angle of insight that no other distro has. That is, that users want something that just works in ways that leave ordinary people knowing what to do, or better, not needing to do anything except the task that interests them. Linspire gets it that most people don't want to do things more complicated than click and run. It takes an enormous effort to make software be just click and it works. That deserves our respect.

All of us are contributing, each in the ways we most understand. This sniping at each other, it is simply harmful.

I think I am going to go install Linspire. Let's face it, I don't have the time to hassle with making mp3s and dvd players and voip work on the big distros either, and I am a Linux developer, I can't imagine what ordinary users do when they want to use Linux on one of these distros that requires you to get libraries that don't just compile and work and somehow install them before your dvds can play. Or have they finally gotten it together recently, someone tell me....

If it is not written by me, it should just click and run.;-) Or at least, make and run.

Oh, and pissing on nvidia is not reasonable. At least they port to Linux, ATI just ignores us.

Charity is something to be thankful for, not to demand. Free software is charity. I like to do it myself, but that gives me no right to demand it of other more sensible persons.

Lost credibility

[pongo000 (97357)]

I grew disinterested with this article very quickly when I came across this non-sensical:

This fits the perspective of those who prefer non-copleft licenses, namely the Open Source camp.

What? Since when does the "Open Source camp" prefer non-copyleft licenses? What kind of drivel is this?

And why is no one screaming and pulling their hair over the fact that Dell ships their RH Enterprise-equipped machines with closed-source nVidia drivers?

I teach my Open Source Technology students that OS is a continuum, and that everyone falls somewhere along that continuum. ESR embraces the business side of OSS, while RMS (firmly!) embraces the libre side...everyone involved in OSS has some philosophical bent. If PJ has a problem with Linspire, she has every right to rant about it. But since she doesn't speak for the OSS movement, we have every right to ignore her (or pick up the pieces we agree with and discard the rest).

The beauty of OSS is that there's room for everyone. Don't like what Linspire is doing? No worries, come up with your own distro that ships with OSS versions of whatever it is about Linspire that rubs you the wrong way.

Re:Does he have some examples?

[tclark (140640)]

Keep in mind that you can't rely on the nVidia drivers to work, because they are closed source. Opting for a closed source driver is accepting that Bad Things may happen to your system, and you may not get any help if they do.

Re:Does he have some examples?

[x2A (858210)]

Their windows drivers are closed source, but I expect them to work. I also /do/ expect the nvidia linux drivers to work, because... they do!

Sure, nvidia "might not" keep the drivers up to date with all the linux kernel side changes that are going on, but they "might not" with windows as well... but they do, so their customers can use their product.

Okay, this weeks drivers might not work with next weeks kernel, but this is a problem with the linux kernel not having the same backwards compatibility as windows

Re:Does he have some examples?

[Arker (91948)]

Drivers for fully supported hardware are kept right in there in the kernel tree on kernel.org.

Whenever the internal kernel interfaces change (which is really pretty rarely) kernel programmers also check all those drivers and make any changes necessary.

Once a device is supported, it's very nearly perpetual. It's rare for drivers to be removed, and usually when they are it's because they've been superceded (the hardware still works, the support is just being done more elegantly, for instance when 2.6.16 was r

how it works

[r00t (33219)]

Lack of backwards compatibility would "doom all driver projects to eternal development", except that kernel drivers are updated by whoever breaks backwards compatibility. This is why drivers need to be in the official kernel source tree. Driver authors often sit back and relax while other people make the required changes to all drivers in the tree. Updating the drivers is often a robotic task, often taken on by the "kernel janitors" team.

This usually keeps the less-popular drivers alive for many years, thou

Re:Does he have some examples?

[Bacon Bits (926911)]

Wow, that is just the absolute pinnacle of FOSS FUD.

Who else but the designers of the hardware to produce drivers (open or otherwise)? They have access to hardware schematics, development plans, and the engineers who designed everything from the fabrication plants to the chips you're writing the drivers for. Do you honestly think you're a good enough programmer to fix a driver for hardware you have no knowledge of? I'm not a programmer hardly at all. It doesn't matter to me if it's open or closed. Either way, I can't fix anything.

Assuming that something won't work because it's closed source is as stupid as the closed source camp claiming FOSS is more susceptible to security vulnerabilities. It's absolute BS. And won't get any help from the vendor? I'd say I'm as likely to not get help from a vendor as it is likely that the FOSS community will label my bug Won't-Fix. God forbid I happen to get some rare bit of critical hardware for which the FOSS "community" consists of one guy who's a complete idiot.

Yes, I understand the FOSS model. Yes, I beleive it is superior. Yes, I believe it is the future. But avoiding closed software because of some nebulous bugaboo makes you seem like Chicken Little in a snowstorm.