Interesting article over at kernel trap. It seems there is a BSD driver for the new Intel wireless cards that do not require the binary daemon. The author takes a cheap shot at Linux, claiming driver devels are too afraid of pissing of Intel and are happy to ship the binary blob. I can say I am proud of Fedora’s stance on not shipping that binary blob but Damien Bergamini, the author of the driver, does hit on an important issue. Shipping said binary blobs does take the motivation out of making a working open source driver.

Mostly it is from the hardware vendors side. If they can get away with binary blobs and distros are willing to ship them, there is more incentive for them not to write an open source driver. If we allow the Intel wireless binary blob in it is just a signal to other vendors that they can keep their bits in a daemon and placate us with GPL’ed hooks.

It is not about us wanting to steal intellectual property and put it in the public domain. It is about us wanting to create a solid and stable operating system that works well with any hardware. We can’t do that if we can’t poke at the bits freely.

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]