yazdzikPremium,MVM
join:2000-07-26
Honesdale, PA
kudos:1 | Dear EQ and friends,
That is correct. The idea is that open source is open source. At the same time, people who sell stuff have to make sure that the stuff they sell is competitive, i e, better or cheaper, or both. The way they make that stuff competitive is to have one gizmo better than what a person "learned in the art" can do. This is what creates the need for copyright, as permitted and required by the US constitution.
That having been said, if computer manufacturers all used bios switching of the video cards, while one could not, in theory, use the power saving features(one of the things that is, for some, better or cheaper, viz supra, about a new cpu and gpu combo) one can at least have the option to use the full power of the discrete gpu all the time. This is what I ended up doing. This however, as one sees form the contorted sentence above, is the very thing creating the conundrum, not the use of one card or the other, which is how most of us will solve the problem interim, but to allow use of a kernel feature prohibited by (perhaps unenforceable) contract to use.
There is no way to have both completely open source code and proprietary secrets in hardware.
We can argue this point forever, but unless we are all running business apps on servers we control, everyone I know, in the quasi real world I inhabit, wants the fastest best graphics possible, and the average consumer running a linux based OS does not prefer to miss out on stuff the windows world has.
This argument has been made everywhere I frequent for as long as the kernel has been used by a large-ish group of non-coders.
My own personal summary, from my daily perursal of the debian devs lists:
Coders get paid. Period. Manufacturers get paid. Period.
Coders' pay can be cash, or the sheer ego trip of being someone who can do something the rest of us cannot, promoting an almost religious belief in their own passion.
Manufacturers, if one eliminate someone like the late Sir David Brown, prefer cash, and, in my limited experience, almost always demand it.
This discussion has not changed since the turn of the century, and likely will not.
Open source is neither free as in beer, nor as in ideas, but another kind of trade. At this point in my life, I am so used to the system I use, moving from evolution to outlook or trying to set up a windows machine with the necessary bells and whistles would be akin to the panic of the secretary learning that her shop would suddenly "go Linux".
The most salient argument remains, however, that people will always have to buy hardware, irrespective of how free, beerwise, software were. This inherent dichotomy is unlikely to change.
Thus, my own argument against any form of zealotry remains as it was, unpersuasive as it might be. Insisting upon something that inconveniences others is not compassionate. If great code be an ideal in itself, this is moot, as well as illogical. If, on the other hand, the purpose of free code is to better the lives of all those around us, asking nothing in return, then worrying about licensing for kernel code is equally illogical.
I am old. The battles my youth are behind, and my strength fails. Every post here may be my last. With that, I can only say that if allowing deviation from a licence conveniences someone the way allowing someone to cut a queue in terrible traffic while owning the right of way or lane, than I am all for it.
Kindness trumps ideology in a world where a smile still matters, softness of demeanour still holds, and the usefulness of technology to build a kinder, gentler world for human beings remains its purpose.
Love,
M
--
Life is a series of return dates. There is but one final argument, its eloquence determines who we were, and whether who we were had meaning. |
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