Infinite Freedom???

Bryan J Smith b.j.smith at ieee.org
Wed Jun 20 16:38:10 UTC 2007


I tried to be nice in my first response, making a suggestion for consideration by the board.
Technical feasibility, after redistribution and related indemnification issues, is the priority before we put philosophy in front of simple, GPL compatible bundling.

But after that, and I have to apologize for sometimes being "blunt" in my use of the word "ignorant,"
I sometimes like (too much) to be that "outsider" (non-Red Hat employee, non-Fedora participant, nor any other "stakeholder") that just tells it that way.

Which drove my 2nd/3rd posts, especially when someone tries to tell me
- an unmentionable, mediocre EE and otherwise insigniciant embedded developer, but still someone who is remotely knowlegeable of microcontroller/ASIC programming and toolchains -
what exactly the "absolute" or, worse yet, "assumed" stance of the FSF is on this.

We're not talking about drivers and code like ATI's and nVidia's memory management to do software
(I.e., Linux kernel) based GPU-CPU coherency (at least on Intel bus/single point of contention interconnects without on CPU-GPU I/O MMUs,
something Intel itself won't GPL either and leaves out of their i8xx/9xx series kernel suppoert
much to the piss-poor performance of their Linux GLX v. Windows ICD - all while holding the IP that prevents ATI/nVidia from opening theirs -
nVidia did a partial code release back in 2.2 for XFree86 3.3 to no joy of Intel lawyers).
And we're not talking about the drivers for software that Linux uses to drive the device itself.

We're either talking about the on-hardware (system-updated) or shared memory (system-hosted) byte code that drives non-x86/host-platform microcontroller/ASICs.
Things that won't build with the binutils, GCC and other "toolchain" components in virtually any distro
(ansd variations in peripherals in various core-based instances will still differ for the "base" toolchain of any target for various hardware).

So, again, if you're not following these concepts, it's best if you make no assumptions.
Especially when the complexities of the arguments differ enough, but are often still allowed by the GPL or Linus' (among others) clear, legal-based statements on copyrights.
There are bigger and better targets to point your finger at, which are actual GPL issues in the kernel.


--  
Bryan J Smith - mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  
http://thebs413.blogspot.com  
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile  
    

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen van Meeuwen <kanarip at kanarip.com>

Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:09:35 
To:b.j.smith at ieee.org,       For discussions about marketing and expanding the Fedora user base <fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Infinite Freedom???


Bryan J Smith wrote:
> [...]

+1,

*applause*

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip




More information about the marketing mailing list