12.18.06

BoycottNovell.com First Month Statistics

Posted in Action, Boycott Novell, Site News at 11:54 pm by Shane Coyle

Not from the Lies or Damned Lies Department…

But, as always they are statistics, so what do they mean, really?

Over 15,000 Unique Visitors with Over 100,000 Pages Served

That’s November 13 – December 13, Most visitors are from the US, with Great Britain, Netherlands, unknown?, the EU and Australia also strongly represented.

5 Most Popular Articles

Demographics

Obviously, these values are easily altered on the client side, so take them for what they are worth, like all statistics.

Operating System

43% Linux
38% Windows
4% Mac

Web Browser

62% Firefox
9% Konqueror
8% Internet Explorer
3% Opera

The biggest referrers were stumbleupon, and Digg. That pleases me since it shows that the message is being spread in a grassroots fashion.

Overall, I don’t know if these numbers are "good" or not. I suppose an average of 500 new visitors per day hearing about the campaign against Novell, combined with Bruce Peren’s petition (which is nearly at 3,000 signatures) is a pretty good start in any case.

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Freedom vs. Features – Ubuntu’s Search for Bling

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, GPL, Ubuntu, Vista, Windows at 4:04 pm by Shane Coyle

While I fully understand the intent and frustration behind the whole no proprietary blobs in the kernel argument, it wouldn’t have had the desired effect – the GPL does not exclude the loading of closed modules, just the distribution with such modules, as I understand it anyhow.

Which, brings me to this: Jono Bacon has a posting in which he is arguing for the community to compromise its commitment to freedom so that distributions (Ubuntu) can ship 3D accelerated desktops that compete, very favorably, with Mac and Windows. Bacon makes the argument that, without bling, Linux will be relegated to a niche OS and never able to achieve world domination.

What I believe is critically important is that we never stop fighting for Open Source 3D graphics drivers. A comprimise in freedom in part of the wider Linux distribution needs to be backed up with a confidence that the freedom will continue to be the priority as market share grows. The key difference here is our approach to getting this freedom – it will only happen with market pressure. The fight for free drivers for reasons of freedom has not proved successful, and the choice to only buy Intel will have some impact, but not a huge impact due to lower market share. We need to become a large and relavent player, a player that can mandate decisions at a market level that will truly affect the market. Sure, there are plenty of challenges to this approach – when we get a large market share, would Linux distributions really want to rock the boat and demand Open Source drivers? Well, this is the proof of the pudding. I expect companies such as Canonical, Red Hat, Linspire and Novell to always place consistant market pressure on the hardware manufacturors to understand and migrate to the ethos of free software.

I am all for bling, beryl is fantastic, and I have no problem with users installing proprietary drivers – wireless, raid, graphics, on their own machine(s). Actually, lsmod on this laptop shows the fglrx module is loaded. I personally couldn’t care less about market share for GNU/Linux, but fully respect those who do – as long as they play within the rules (Hoooray! Red Hat, Boooo! Novell).

The GPL is not an EULA, it is a distribution license, I can do what I like with the software on my machine, including making a bastardized GNU/proprietary system tuned just the way I like it, with whatever I need to best support my hardware. But if I wanted to distribute the software as such, I wouldn’t be able to do so under the GPL, I could contact all of the authors and try to work out alternate licensing, but not under the GPL, again as I understand it.

I do agree that only market pressure will force the proprietary drivers to open up, but if Ubuntu and other distributions take the annoyance away from the end user, there will be no market backlash. The fact that users need to go through extra steps to enable multimedia and 3D support is lamentable, but it is the only way that people would become aware of the issue and exert any pressure on the manufacturers.

Regardless, as I see it, Ubuntu cannot ship the proprietary drivers and abide by the GPL. It is not a question of compromising ideals, but rather violating the license that allows you to redistribute other’s work. I thought that the Kororaa thing brought this out and clarified it, but now we have Sabayon (an awesome distro, sorry to call them out) and Ubuntu heading down the same precipitous path.

Why is it so bad to include it in the unofficial, but obligatory, Automatix? Or, after first boot presenting the user with an option to improve the graphics/networking performance by downloading a "better" driver for the detected hardware.

So, users are a short nag screen and a few clicks from GUI heaven, it still didn’t cost anyone their liberty or violate anyone’s copyright. You can even put in a button for sending a nastygram to the detected closed-source vendor’s ombudsman office asking them to open up their specs or drivers.

Maybe that would have the desired effect.

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Bad, Bad Proprietary Binary Blobs

Posted in Fork, FSF, FUD, GNU/Linux, GPL, Law, Microsoft, Novell at 9:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

As soon as you think that Microsoft cannot harm the GPL through Novell, you then discover this [rel="nofollow"]:

Apparently, as of January 2008, non-GPL Linux kernel modules will no longer be allowed…

Well, as a person who not only works for Microsoft, but does so enthusiastically, I just want to say “thank you.” Thank you for creating a policy that will make it less likely that makers of video cards will pay any attention to Linux. Yes, “the community” will beaver away to make these drivers themselves based on published chip specifications, but now you’ve ruled out the people who actually MAKE the chips from writing these things unless they agree to donate all their hard work for use by the community and competitors alike. Even Eric Raymond was against a policy that forbade proprietary drivers (yes, I realize he is not part of the “free software” movement, as “open source” != “free software”).

Clearly enough, there’s a conflict of interests here. The GPLv3 is intended to leave Novell out in the cold, despite their optimism. At the same time, the Linux kernel is unlikely to embrace GPLv3. Pamela Jones from Groklaw has responded to the misinformed post, a relevant fragment of which is quoted above:

I think you can see from this cynical blog entry that Microsoft is behind the push to make sure GNU/Linux is contaminated by proprietary blobs. Why and what the plan is I don’t know. But if Microsoft’s John Carroll really believed that refusing proprietary modules was going to be bad for Linux, would he stay silent and let it happen? Or would he write about how foolish it is? You decide. I know I have. And the Novell deal helps me to think it through as to what Microsoft’s motive might be. By the way, note the LWN News Picks, that shows the end of the conversation, with the decision that there would be no such deadline to ban non GPL linked modules, in spite of what Carroll inaccurately reported. Sheesh.

The full exchange of opinions between the kernel hackers can be found on Gname.

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