Invitation to ubuntu developers

Jeremy Schoenhaar jeremy at fam-schoenhaar.de
Sun Nov 26 15:34:49 GMT 2006


Am Sonntag, den 26.11.2006, 10:17 -0500 schrieb Tim Schmidt:
> On 11/26/06, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > The sad, but true reality is just that the nv driver developemtn seems
> > totally dead and seems to regress further. While 2D worked perfectly
> > well in Warty, video playback got broken in Hoary, and in Dapper it
> > became totally unusable for me (perpetual screen flicker). The bug [1]
> > didn't get any reply unfortunately, I guess people just develop/use
> > the nvidia driver.
> 
> Hey Martin...
> 
> I have no doubt development on nv is slow or dead.  Nouveau is a much
> more promising project to hack on.  However, 2D - for the purposes of
> installing - works perfectly.  For everyone like you, who doesn't get
> enough out of nv, and nouveau isn't quite ready yet, I'm all for
> making the nvidia driver, as illegal as it is, super-easy to install.
> A one-click GUI op, preferably.
> 
> I'm perfectly happy with allowing someone to choose bling over
> security, Freedom, maintainability (even the worst obfuscated,
> hex-encoded code is more maintainable than a binary blob), et al.  But
> give users the choice.  In order to do that, the installer must at
> least offer the option to install no closed-source stuff.
> 
> Sometimes adhering to our (Ubuntu's) philosophy isn't fun.  Mostly
> when the open-source solution isn't quite up to snuff yet.  If we all
> just went running to the closed fix, there's be no Ubuntu to hack on.
> 
> --tim

Nobody is saying that we should not strive for a workable opensource
driver for ATI/NVIDIA cards, WIFI cards, etc.. But until we have them we
are forced to use the best solution at hand. As Developers, and many of
us long time linux users, we hold the philosophy behind GNU/Linux very
dear. We need to remember however that we also started somewhere. I
remember when I was the typical windows user that expected things to
"Just Work". Instead of making the non-free modules default make them a
CLEAR, and not hidden option explaining the risks to the installing
person, and let him decide between "fully functioning" and 100%
opensource.

Jeremy Schoenhaar




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