Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

>  And more important we expect that the 
> applications we need are available for Linux. Do we care about hackers' 
> right to free hardware information? No. 

In my article I tried to explain to you why you SHOULD care. If you can
get your drivers ONLY for the SLES/RHEL distros... would you be happy
with that? Are you currently running RHEL or SLES? If not, why not? If
you have a reason for that... then maybe you shouldn't be happy about
the direction things are going either!

Open drivers are NOT just for hackers. GET THAT? They are there for YOU
as well. So that YOU can run whatever linux you want, not just today but
also tomorrow and next month and later. Maybe you don't want to read the
source code, maybe you're no programmer at all and don't know how to
read it. Yet even if you use nvidia and ndiswrapper you depend on the
rest of the kernel drivers to be open to run the distribution you want,
and not RHEL or SLES.

Maybe saying this makes me a fundamentalist GPL terrorist (as some have
called me as reaction to the article I wrote). To some degree I don't
care, I've been called worse.

But I am hoping that people like you (and I don't mean that in any
negative way) start to realize why you can run the linux you want today,
and that embracing binary drivers as a good thing will threaten that
ability in the future.