Intel to Increase Linux Support, Release Centrino Drivers 381
jonman_d writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that Intel has promised to increase Linux support by releasing Linux drivers at the same time it releases Windows drivers for its hardware. According to the general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group, Intel wants Linux users to be able to use their hardware as easily, or easier, than any other hardware on the planet." Pingla writes in with more good news: "Intel promises to release Linux drivers for its Centrino chipset at the same time it releases drivers for Windows. An article featuring Lindows (aka Lin---s) on CNet has more." Sadly, the Centrino support will most likely be a proprietary driver, but it's better than nothing.
Big Hurdle (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
People should not accept this or we'll get into another situation like you have with NVidia. Get a brand new box and you can't even do a net install on your Nforce chipset box because you need the nvnet driver which is a proprietary binary-only module and the manufacturer of the motherboard may or may not have included a pre-compiled binary on a floppy for you to use, but it's most likely only for Red Hat 9, etc. Screw all binary drivers, I insist on open source drivers for everything. The only thing I've had to relent on lately is the graphics card since the Nvidia stuff is the only decent graphics card out there but the modules are binary only. Sadly, my Nvidia card is also the most unstable part of my Linux box and it crashes (hard locks up) at least every 2 weeks or so and I have to power cycle the box. Fscking Nforce craptastic Asus A7N8X-Deluxe piece of shit motherboard.
Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. Because obviously no other companies have been able to produce wireless networking products. I can see the point of commercial secrecy when you have some l33t hardware that no-one else can make, but when you just have yet another implementation of something that's already widespread and implemented in lots of different ways it seems dumb to worry too much about protecting it through drivers. If the other companies cared enough about your particular methods they'd just get a team of coders to reverse engineer the closed-source drivers.
Then what about Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would 'Proprietary Drivers' be so 'sad'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel can do what they want. They are the owners of their hardware designs and the drivers to make that hardware function.
If it's so sad that Intel is going to provide proprietary drivers, do you get sad everytime you get into your automobile? (The computer under your hood mosty likely uses proprietary drivers to interface with the autmobile.)
There is room for both open and closed software in this world. I for one envision a world where the Operating System is wide open with all the tools one needs to make whatever changes they wish to it and to develop whatever they want to on it. If hardware manufacturers want to keep some or all of their drivers 'secret' that's fine, let them. If application developers want to keep their 'Whiz-Bang 2.0' application proprietary, let them.
Believe whatever you want. I have and still use quite a large amount of both proprietary and open source software and in some cases, the open source software is better, in other cases, the proprietary software is better, even for the same task.
What needs to end are silly proprietary APIs put into an OS by particular vendors to allow their other applications to run like the dickens while making competitor's applications less capable.
Give us documentation... instead of closed drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt that they will open souce their drivers. So the Linux developers will write their own anyway, whenever they can.
And personaly, as a user, I find open source drivers much more convenient.
Re:**SIGH** (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about RMS. Open source drivers benefit the development of the kernel, and also the users of the drivers and hardware those drivers support. Remember when the linux kernel was at 2.6, but we had to wait some time before nvidia released 2.6 compatible drivers? If they were GPL, the kernel developers could have incorporated the drivers into the kernel and development would have gone concurrently.
Even now, sticking a closed source driver in there is problematic if there's a kernel panic. How are you going to debug it? What about security? Nobody ourside of nvidia has audited the code. There could be a potential vulnerability that they missed. We negate the benefits of open source if only *part* of our program is open source.
Re:**SIGH** (Score:5, Insightful)
That's quite a flamebait-inducing post you've got there...
What about other operating systems? Do we have to badger Intel to release drivers for BSD, and whatever other operating systems might be released in the future?
What happens if we release a new kernel, or decide to change something that breaks the rigid structure into which this proprietary driver is locked?
Releasing proprietary drivers like this seems to be no more than a "keep them happy" quick-fire solution, as this is by no means a long-term solution. And frankly, ignoring the long-term is a very short-sighted viewpoint indeed.
What's the ideal solution? Write your drivers so that they use a well-documented and open API that can always be well-supported, and make the code as portable as possible. Then what happens when you want to use your hardware with a different operating system? Well, so long as your operating system implements that particular well-documented and open driver API, then you shouldn't have any problem. Recompile, rinse, repeat.
Think ahead. We wouldn't be pushing for open source drivers without reason.
I just don't get the idea of the Centrino anyway (Score:5, Insightful)
open source drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is what? A ompany providing kick-ass drivers that give superior performance than that same hardware would give in Windows? What do you suggest using as an alternative to NVIDIA? Ati? HAH, good luck trying to get those drivers to work, open-source or not! And if you do get them to work, what kind of performance are you getting from them? And how about their AMD64-support? NVIDIA has AMD64-drivers available right now. Where are Ati's drivers??? Where are open-source AMD64-drivers for Ati?
One word: Forcedeth.
You know, you CAN use the open-source NV-drivers that ship with Xfree. Or you could use the standard VESA-drivers. So it's not like you are forced to use those drivers. I for one haven't had any problems with NV-drivers.
proprietary drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Proprietary drivers are a bad idea for linux. Now I have to say, the licensing issue does matter to me. Even if you don't care, there are plenty of technical reasons to avoid them and pester a company to release the source for their drivers. First of all, the code is usually sub-par. EEs right them, they're smart people, no doubt, but most of them aren't programmers and lot's of bugs and race conditions show up. The OSS community can't help debug them because we don't have the source. Furthermore, on a more personal level, most of the kernel hackers don't give two shits about proprietary drivers, because of that, they generally stay buggy and improperly maintained. Intel is a big enough company that they'll properly produce high-quality drivers; however, it is simply a fact that letting the OSS community have the source would increase their quality, more eyes looking at the code, and they would be the same people that have written the kernel. These debates flair up all the time on LKML. I was too lazy to go look for links to specific discussions, if you're interested in the issue however, they wouldn't be hard to find.
- Ryan, who can't remember his password right now, and so posted AC
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
Or if you use something other than ix86 platforms. Vendors will probably not make binary drivers for CF-cards on my Yopy.
Although in this Centrino case this might not be a big issue.
Or you want to path your driver. I.e to allow TV-out on your graphics card. Or fix a bug.
Or you use a !Linux OSS OS, like BSD.
Or you use an old or experimental kernel.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
- fix bugs/do workarounds for the hardware the manufacturer doesn't care about
- tweak the driver to your needs (this is not a joke: I'm glad that the tmscsim-driver for Tekram SCSI cards could be tweaked by me to work seamlessly with my old SCSI scanner!)
- have support for the hardware as long as YOU wish
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
That will take much longer if non-free drivers are available. Intel said somewhere that they won't release the driver as free software because they fear that this would reveal too much information about the hardware itself. So when Intel is out, the driver has to come from a third party. And clearly, the urge to develop a free driver is much lower when there is already a proprietary one available.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:1, Insightful)
Btw... did I forget to mention that I'm running Windows?
To everyone saying whats wrong with proprietery. (Score:5, Insightful)
To those who say, but Windows DRivers are closed. They are not to the kernel developers. When installing new drivers you may of had a warning that a driver wasnt signed. A signed driver means one that has had its source code audited by MS for bugs, and is more stable than a unsigned one. Microsoft dosent like closed source (unsigned) drivers, and will warn you if you try to install it.
So if you want a stable Linux, don't load closed source modules into it. Dont take unstabllity for short term hardware support over stabillity in the long term. Encourage companies to open their source, or reverse engineer and stablise their drivers!
Re:Why would 'Proprietary Drivers' be so 'sad'? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's is interesting in Linux kernel, is that the driver API is always changing ; backward compatibility has little or no importance in the development. Enterprises developing proprietary drivers are not very responsive to these changes. Having GPL'd drivers included in the kernel permits to adress problems quickly and efficiently.
Testing and review is the strength of Free Software.
Re:Why would 'Proprietary Drivers' be so 'sad'? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes there is. That does not mean that the choice is value neutral, however.
The licensing of the relevant code is a part of the feature set just as much as the checklist items for the hardware is. It is another item that the customer needs to evaluate and contrast with competing offerings.
This is why the anguished cries of some manufacturers against governments requiring open source rings so hollow. Just as a customer can require for instance Word file import capability, or three year installation and upgrade support, they can require open source compatible licensing. It is another feature that may carry more or less importance depending on the customer.
So, if someone says they will not consider hardware without open source drivers, that just means they, for various reasons, value the feature of open source relatively highly, and are ready to pick another supplier to get the feature they want. Note that it really is not just about whether open source or proprietary software is better; the licensing is in itself one (sometimes major) factor in determining the "betterness" of a piece of software.
e100/e1000 began proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
So, even if they are originally released as proprietary, who cares, I bet the source will sooner or later be released.
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
It's quite a bad thing, irrespective of religion, if the vendors don't release enough documentation of the devices to make open source drivers. We'll end up in a situation where it'll be difficult to install Linux/*BSD on a machine whithout proprietary drivers. As an example, for the NForce chipset I've to buy a NIC due to lack of driver.
As documentation goes, Intel network division is very bad : they release GPL drivers, but no documentation is given (without NDA). That makes it difficult to make good open source drivers. And now the same company wants us to accept more and more hardware components with only a vague promise of drivers, much less documentation?
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to upgrade to new fancy-schmancy kernel 2.7.x and you can't because your CPU-centr-a-yummy needs 2.6.x to install properly. They never keep up or give anything more than half-assed support. I had an nVidia TNT2, and I gave up on nVidia stuff, because I hated being locked in to THEIR schedule... and it crashed a lot, would corrupt the video (you could log in remotely though) and the only thing I could do was reset. I moved on.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big Hurdle (Score:3, Insightful)
(That's the main reason why the Linux desktop will take off on the corporate desktop first (if at all). Every good administrator looks for unified hardware in a big company. Checking if Linux is OK is simple. With 100 different computer configurations you will always find combinations that won't work with Linux (but of course work with Windows (at least kind of work
bye egghat.
Intel once again behind the 8-ball (Score:5, Insightful)
That is so 15-minutes-ago.
802.11g is all-the-rage, there are proprietary (I cannae give ye much more, cap'n) extensions to g which give it even more KickAss throughput and already Intel even are trying to jumpstart "more wireless speed than you would know what to do with" mode AKA UltraWideBand based technologies.
Somebody releasing half-assed (in the sense that we have to rely on them to provide timely updates, because it's not open source) drivers for last-years wireless technology is not in any sense of the phrase "stuff that matters".
On this kind of timescale I expect we're soon going to have our own OpenSource (we worked it out for ourselves, thanks for nothing) drivers.
Intel is a large enough company making enough profit that they could easily afford to provide current-and-up-to-date drivers for their wireless technologies as they release them not whenever they're no longer busy doing "important stuff".
Intel, you're half-assed. Period.
Behind the 8-ball when it comes to 64bit (busily playing catch-up to AMD) and can't be bothered getting out drivers for your technologies.
Here's a clue
Intel, please just plain get up off your fat hairy ass and deliver drivers (we'll live with proprietary if you insist) as soon as the hardware is available on the shelf and provide timely updates for new OS releases (dammit man, it's not like we're releasing a new MAJOR kernel every month) Yours truly The Community (aka Your Customers)
Re:Why would 'Proprietary Drivers' be so 'sad'? (Score:3, Insightful)
With Open Source drivers, if the hardware manufacturer stops supporting your hardware/OS & stops shipping drivers it doesn't matter. If the kernel radically changes and incorporates new features which you need, you don't have to wait for the hardware manufacturer to produce updated drivers.
Most of these are things which you don't need to worry about today, when you can just go to the website & download drivers. How about tomorrow?
I don't mind the proprietary*(sp) drivers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Let companies provide us with their drivers in any form that they choose. Chances are they will be better than using wrappers or an opensource driver that does not utilize the full capability of the hardware.
I have already paid for my hardware, be it new or used. If I can't find a driver to use it under Linux or *BSD then I won't buy it. I can't afford a license for a competing operating system, as a result I can't afford some hardware. With intel supporting hardware under linux this give me and many other college students a break on our wallets. Now all we need to do is purchase our student copies of Codeweavers Crossover office (www.codeweavers.com) and MS Office if needed. I have a database class and all the databases are Access so I need MS Office to make sure my databases are 100% like the professors. I would use an opensource program but sometimes they don't save the database correctly.
So let the hardware companies support linux in any way they choose. It makes Linux look more attractive to the average user or company. The more users, the more (and better) software out there.
~ryan
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who don't care can do what they like at purchase time and they should have the ability to get their closed source drivers so they can use Linux too. It's all a stepping stone to going completely open source. That's not to say closed source should ship with the kernel, because it shouldn't - that position is reserved for open source only.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Want your Cake and Want to Eat it Too (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel, NVidia, etc. have spent millions of US$, Euros, etc. developing their hardware and software. They need a competitive edge to their products (real or imagined). If they can protect their interfaces, at least for a short period of time, they can stay ahead of the competititon (or try to).
On the other hand, Open Source including Linux needs the broadest support possible. Restricting the O/S to only closed drivers will scare traditional companies away (and already has in come cases, think Canon printers). It will limit the accessibility to state of the art HW and SW. Much of the performance gains in modern hardware are due to the software drivers (graphics comes to mind). If you give away all your software, you weaken your position in the market and it can affect your bottom line.
The primary objective of a company is to maximize shareholder's wealth. Put these problems in this context.
Linux is the best thing out there. Mozilla and OpenOffice rock. I love open source (free and otherwise) software and support it whenever I can. However there is a market for state of the art hardware (Nvidia) and software (Intel compiler, Oracle database, high-end applications, etc.). We live in a mixed environment.
Do you want to be paid as a programmer? Do you want to have some worth to your products? There is a strong market for commercial, closed software (specialized software, industrial databases, custom solutions, high-end games). Not all can be free and open, nor should it be. It is far harder to make money on just services. Do you want programmer jobs to go to India like the mass of consumer hardware now made in the far east? Are the US and Europe becoming consumers and service organizations with few products of our own?
I can't resist mentioning Microsoft in this context. Much of what they do is now a commodity (operating system: use Linux, word processing/presentation/spreadsheet: use open office, servers: use Linux/BSD with Samba, etc.). They are the competition in the desktop, server, and embedded spaces. They are getting scared (think trapped beast). How can we compete with Microsoft with their nearly 100% (until recently) closed products? By working with vendors that can't or won't open their products. By getting commodity and older product drivers released (for example Canon printers - hint, hint). By working with hardware/software vendors on state of the art drivers but letting them keep their core IP if it helps them with a competitive edge (and gets us drivers).
Mmmm.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Pingla writes in with more good news: "Intel promises to release Linux drivers for its Centrino chipset at the same time it releases drivers for Windows.
OK, that first piece of news is nice, but the second one really gets my heart racing.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:**SIGH** (Score:3, Insightful)
Who the hell cares besides RMS? I love using my machine and it has an nVidia card in it. I don't care that their "driver" is closed source, I can play a lot of heavy duty games with it.
[Raises hand] While I am not dogmatic about it, there are a few serious practical concerns about closed source drivers;
Can't use them out of the box; it's another set of steps.
The closed drivers tend to be flaky.
There are few reasons *not* to go with open source...and quite a few reasons not to.
Allowing the code to be reviewed and fixed, having nearly automatic support for non-x86 CPUs, having a much wider user base, and simple good will are reasons to release the source.
In some cases -- and Intel and Nvidia specifically can do this -- a mix of 'firmware' style add-ins limited narrowly to a few 3rd party propriatory parts would probably work. Hiding the source to protect it from prying eyes isn't a good reason since everyone has debuggers and disassemblers...so if they want to know they probably already do know how the secret sauce is made and what it does.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Setting an example (Score:5, Insightful)
What Intel is doing is doubly bad:
1) They are releasing a Closed Driver, killing future development, growth and porting of support to future systems.
2) Really only doing this to spite Lin--s. They are doing this to STOP Lin--s' open-source driver development.... probably not because they want to. Why couldnt they have been forthcoming "we are working on a driver. we intend to release it first qtr 2004. we are making it closed." Why keep the FreeSoftware universe in the dark..? Because they want to hold all the marbles, withholding information is dishonesty. Plain and simple. If you want to be 'trusted', keep no secrets.
Re:proprietary drivers (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
I have an Abit NF7-S with DDR400 RAM, an XP 2500+ CPU and a GeForce FX5900 at 8X AGP. I dual boot Windows XP(games) and gentoo 2.6(everything else).
I have no problems. Anyone who does have problems just isn't doing it right. Absolutely all of my hardware works perfectly in both oses. Yours should too. My SATA even works now because of 2.6. I think I'll up it to 2.6.3 next week
And who cares if drivers are OSS or not? Are you really going to be modifying your video driver? Even if you are, can you do it better than NVidia, the people who make the chip? I doubt there are security holes in it that need fixing or hidden spywares in it. Most of the advantages of OSS don't come into play when making drivers. In fact, I think that OSS would be a disadvantage with drivers. And as long as the binary drivers are free as in beer it doesn't affect me either way.
Benefit to me of using binary driver - computer works fast. Caveat to me.... none.
Benefit to me of using OSS driver - computer works fast. Caveat to me.... less fast, not all features implemented perfectly.
I however do admit I use forcedeth, why? Well because its easier to setup, just a kernel config option, and it works just as fast. I don't think that will ever happen with video card drivers.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the days of drum memories, computer manufacturers would often offer you software gratis -- in return for which, you were expected to offer them something you had written, so they could pass it around to their other customers. This was a form of policed open source. With no such things as high-level languages, there was no distinction between source and binary; one line of assembly language translated directly to one word of machine code. Experienced programmers could read the ones and zeros as ups and downs on an oscilloscope screen and understand them as an instruction.
Then, somehow, sometime it all got stuffed up, when people began trying to treat ideas as property and earn money by litigation
Didn't they say this last year? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I also believed them that their crap keeps cool. Even at 600MHz (instead of 1300) and doing nothing this thing gets freaking hot and makes lots of noise.
I am MUCH happier with my Crusoe (Toshiba Libretto) notebook. I guess my next one will be an Efficeon.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Full stop, no.
On the contrary, all of those examples show how I am more likely to use and buy a product if I know how to use it.
If I could look at a product's manuals, and from that, figure out how to copy the product, then you can be quite certain I knew 99% of what I needed to know to make such a product beforehand.
For example, if I hand you a black box that takes two numbers as input and outputs a third, and you deduce that it's a multiplication box, you knew everything you needed to know to make a multiplication box before I even handed it to you.
On top of this, if you simply copy a competitor, you're a year behind them and dead meat anyway.
Re:I blame Linus Torvalds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
You now have the choice of ditch X and replace with something else (if it is even available.) Do not upgrade and eventually left in a situation of either ignoring security updates or backporting them yourself. Or write your own driver for X.
I put together a Web server for a charity once out of a bunch of old spare parts. There was a K6-2 CPU and MOBO (witha bad parallel port) , an old 10baseT ISA NIC, an 8GB HDD, an 2GB HDD, and an ISA Video card. While a junky computer, it works and with Linux was stable. If any of those components had Proprietary drivers we would have been stuck installing some old version of Linux.
Remember Corel WPO? No longer works on any modern distro. That pretty much sucks. Same sort of thing will happen with proprietary drivers.
Re:proprierty drivers (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:e100/e1000 began proprietary (Score:2, Insightful)
You, sir, are an idiot. Do we really want to get ourselves forced into a corner of using old hardware all the time? I should hope not.
But he does have a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Now my main point is this could lead to some problems for us linux users. Like he pointed out its possible in the future that we'll all be stuck with mobo's that don't work unless we load a dozen proprietary drivers. We did without in the 90's and we can do without now. The nvidia, now the Intel, next the VIA chipsets, its a dangerous trend. You tried to deflate his point at the end by saying just the free nv or vesa etc. What about when that's no longer possible?
The way I see it is this. You should be able to install your OS, have it support your mobo chipset, video card, mouse+keyboard, and ethernet card all with Free software. You should be able to surf the web, get email, use a calendar and contact list, play movies and music, and be able to create Office documents all with Free software. Those are the basics. Anything less is a failure. Right now all of the above is possible. Start throwing in a Nvidia card, a centrino chipset, and the truly Free desktop starts disappearing. Right now its the not the end of the world. But if in the future proprietary binary drivers become the standard a Truly Free Desktop won't exist and there will be no point in using Linux. After all if I need binary drivers for my hardware like in Windows and I continue to use all of my Windows apps via WINE, wtf is the point? Just stick with Windows and the closed source model. Throwing an opensource kernel on top of all that proprietary software is a lost cause.
Re:I blame Linus Torvalds. (Score:5, Insightful)
He says so repeatedly in his posts, so it's not like it is a secret.
No you are wrong here. As a practical matter binary drivers lead to buggy unstable kernels. The people writing these drivers have no contact with or support from experienced kernel developers due to the closed nature of the process, and code quality suffers. And people posting about binary drivers waste everyone's time, including their own.
Linux has a lot of users outside the "hacker set". Did you miss the part about Linux overtaking MacOS and it's current share of the server market?
Re:Closed source drivers can be very helpful (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Time lag and
2. Platform support
How about putting proprietary interfaces in firmware instead. That way it can be updated, and open source drivers don't tell you anything valuable about the hardware IP. I don't mind proprietary firmware but frankly, its the reason I bought a radeon 9000 instead of an nvidia card for my linux box.
One idea (Score:3, Insightful)
One novel approach would be for the company, in this case Intel, to produce a binary driver and place the source code in some form of trust, to be released when they no longer support the driver or the company no longer feels that the source code would provide an advantage to other companies.
Re:Legality of these binary drivers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Never heard anything so stupid. You mean all software written for a particular OS is a derivative work of that OS? Nonsense. Even the LGPL states (within the license itself) that it is legally unclear and therefore it explicitly allows it (the whole point of the license). This is like trying to ban reverse engineering. You need to reference header files when you compile to ensure compatibility - not because you're creating a derivative work. Now using those data structures in your code - not just for the interface to outside code - might be creating a derived work.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, get off your high-horse and appreciate what they're doing. Just because open-source means so much to you, don't assume it means the same to anyone else.
Damn I'm in a cranky mood :-P sorry!
FCC regs (Score:4, Insightful)
Software access to the radio control portion of the system would mean users could adjust the frequency and power output of the system -- something which would run them afoul of FCC regulations requiring that equipment of this nature be fixed and not changeable by the end user. And, the FCC would not take kindly to this. Both Intel, and the modifying user, could be liable.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:proprierty drivers (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact they should be more liable for a closed-source version that may, becuase of a bug, violate FCC regulations. Possibly they fear this sort of information being discovered and this is yet another of the real reasons they don't release the drivers.
Re:Legality of these binary drivers? (Score:3, Insightful)
"I can't imagine any court upholding that writing a driver for an operating system must comply with the OS's licenses."
That's fine, but you havent read the LKML so I'm not sure how you can possibly disagree without even reading the argument for the other side of which you seem totally ingnorant.
"Pick your battles folks. Pissing off potential allies is never a good practice even if you're right."
Picking your battles is good advice. However pissing off people or not is way way down on the list of concerns for most of us then actually making sure that our system of free software stands on firm legal ground and is protected. Ignore licensing issues at your own peril, they are important and they matter. The law, the courts and therefore law inforcement says so.
Re:Proprietary drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
Algorithms? Techniques? Sheesh. Look at the average C header file or a reference document for some trivial microprocessor some day. It's mostly enumerations of functions and constants, with explanations for each one. That's the level of information we need, and historically, vendors who care about their customers give it to them for the asking.
It's as much "moving this bit over there" as posting this comment to slashdot is "moving this bit over there" - but we wouldn't be having this discussion right now if TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML were undocumented and released as some binary-only implementation.
Who cares about their optimizations? We're smart, we can figure that out ourselves.
Re:Don't people see what is happening here? (Score:2, Insightful)