[olug] OT: more Hans goodness

Barry Von Ahsen barry at vonahsen.com
Wed Jul 9 14:13:30 UTC 2008


Luke -Jr wrote:
> On Wednesday 09 July 2008, Will Langford wrote:
>>> Reiser4 isn't because Hans is a raging egomaniac who refused to make the
>>> changes necessary to get it included in the kernel.  Reiser3 has been in
>>> for years, but hasn't been touched by Hans or anyone else at Namesys
>>> since work started on 4.
>> Out of curiosity, by similar logic (ego, not releasing spec/sources...
>> slightly unrelated) -- what about ppl who use drivers who only supply
>> a binary object and wrapper source ? evil!
> 
> I'd say completely unrelated... but such drivers (for Linux, anyhow) are 
> illegal (in the same way 'warez' are). Of course, like 'warez' also, it's the 
> uploader who is infringing, not the user or downloader.

they're not illegal, they're just non-free, and not supported by the 
lkml folk.  the company isn't under any legal obligation to provide a 
driver at all, let alone in the floss license d'jour.

I use debian because it's Free (and free), but I also use the nvidia 
driver, because I paid for my video card, and I want to use it.  I also 
use the intel wireless blobs on my laptop, because my only other option 
was using realtek+ndiswrapper, so I'm certainly Freeer, if not totally 
Free.  maybe I'm just a hypocrite

-barry




More information about the OLUG mailing list