I really don’t want to give too much credit to a site which generates most of it’s traffic from very non-rational arguments, but this site has a link to an article about Ubuntu hurting innovation. A little more disturbing is some of the comments on the article, such as this gem by a fellow named manmist: “Note that Ubuntu ships and installs proprietary drivers by default without giving users a choice. “ and he continues “This is worse than Freespire which atleast has a OSS edition.”
I think it is important to note that Ubuntu sources are available, provided you setup the sources.list properly, by a simple apt-get source packagename. If you need the sources offline, these cds are available on request also. As for the binary drivers bit, from what I can tell no proprietary driver is installed by default if an open alternative exists. Why anyone would just want their hardware to straight up not work is beyond me?
For a related story in my real life experience, I have a Prism54 card. This card works great under Ubuntu, and any version of Linux provided you have the firmware for it. Ubuntu has this by default. I heard all the rage about how cool SLED 10 was on planet gnome, so I gave it a spin. SLED didn’t have my firmware by default, and being that wireless was my only internet connection at the time, I was unable to do anything at all on my system.
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#1 by David Mills on October 6, 2006 - 8:24 am
I hate to be cynical, but I think Mr manmist would also probably be the first complaining if his wifi didn’t work under ubuntu because the drivers weren’t there (ready for the desktop anyone?)
Some people will always find something to complaine about and will only be happy if all free software closes down, and everyone buys microsoft (or adobe or macromedia) liscences, at which point they will be chanting ‘told you so’.
I don’t like to use the T word but the article and the comment both reek of it.
David
#2 by Francesco on October 6, 2006 - 9:41 am
I love Ubuntu, especially its commitment to free software and I do not have anything against it. Because of that our GNU/Linux User Group always hands out Ubuntu CD at our events. But I admit the fact that Ubuntu ships proprietary drivers is a problem for us and we are looking for alternatives. We only want to install free soiftware at our install fests for example and we only want to distribute free software. Having a free version wuithout proprietary software would be a great help (even only the cd image), or at very least a free installation mode. I’ll add another comment this time as user not as GNU/Linux user group member: when I go to an hardware shop, I’d like to be able to put the Ubuntu live/cd in the pc and see it it works and if it does I’m sure it works by only using free software, otherwise I’m not interested to that pc. Beucase of this a free installation mode would help.
greetings
Francesco
#3 by Wam on October 6, 2006 - 12:10 pm
Opensource software/drivers are developped when there is a need for it. Who will develop an open driver when every distribution ships the proprietary one? Would The gimp be what it is now if photoshop existed on Linux? The answer is not that clear for me.
Anyway, for those who want a “clean” system, you can look at http://www.gnewsense.org/
“A GNU/Linux project, to take all the binary blobs out of a rather popular distribution and make it all free. In doing so we have also produced a set of scripts to create a free GNU/Linux Distribution based off Ubuntu.”
No need to complain, just fork
#4 by Chris Cunningham on October 6, 2006 - 3:39 pm
The only non-free software Ubuntu installs is that which is absolutely required to get hardware working. Removing it means nothing expect that people’s hardware will not work. I think you’ve misunderstood exactly what Ubuntu’s position in non-free software is, unless you think that people with no network access will be able to create their own drivers (firmware included) from scratch.
– Chris