Shuttleworth attempts to lure OpenSuse developers to Ubuntu

[Tsuroerusu]

I don't see why everyone is up in arms about Ubuntu and proprietary drivers - I like the way they do it now where I can apt-get them if I want to - but if they want to automatically install the binary driver for my video card and wireless card then so be it - I think I can live with that.

It's a GPL violation directly, Novell does a workaround of a loophole in the GPLv2, which is why they can get away with it, same thing with TiVo and what they do.
A lot of people argue that it's up to the people who make programs such as Flash or Opera to decide how they wanna license their software, ESR is of the opinion that if people wanna make proprietary software they are free to do so. I am not saying people should be forced to make software free (Like in liberty, because you could certainly try to sell a GPLed program if you wanted to), I just they should make it free/open source, that's not to say that they MUST, I just would prefer not to use it if it wasn't free or open source software.
To turn that argument around, people that GPL their software, why should their license not be respected? I don't see anybody calling Microsoft or proprietary software companies zealots for suing people for sharing (In their words, pirating) their software over the web or giving a copy to a neighbor. They are just enforcing their license, why is the GPL any different? It's a license. Sure I'm all for violating proprietary software licenses when they're unfair to the user, and I think they all of them are, but a license that actually tries to protect the user's rights, the GPL specifically, I can't see why it should not be respected. If the kernel developers want to allow for proprietary drivers, they should relicense to LGPL, that way NVIDIA just need to remove the non-reverse engineering clause from their driver license to not have their stuff be a violation. Obviously some kernel hackers do not want their license to be violated, there was a discussion on the opensuse lists recently where people who usually support newcomers in #suse were discussing how to make it easier for new users to install the NVIDIA drivers, and a kernel developer going by the name of Greg HH chimed it and complained about it.
I can understand both sides of the debate, on the one hand you have people who wants to make things easier for the new users, and on the other you have people who wants the license they decided to release code under to be respected.

Suse did it with their product the only difference being I forked out 60 buck for it. so I don't really see a difference.

They have stopped doing it when kernel developers asked them to, and a lot of kernel developers have expressed that they take this kind of violation quite seriously.
Today, SUSE does not include even one proprietary driver, they do make some proprietary stuff available through a "non-oss" repository. Stuff like Opera, RealPlayer, pine and other stuff are available there for the people who wish to use it.

I personally like the reason why Mark S. started ubuntu and that was to give something back to what gave him his riches in the first place and that was thwart certificate service which he built using open source tools - that just goes to show what open source can do - I wish I could come up with something that would make me that rich using open source.

So far I very much agree, although I just wanna have enough money to live like I wanna live, I don't want to be rich and have to have all sorts of crazy alarm systems all over the house.

I also like that the distro is one cd and their no "enterprise" version or "desktop" version. comes on one cd and you make what you want - I like that theory.

Well, different folks have different business models, Canonical's business model is solely support, Novell is both support, services and producing a distribution. You can download SLED 10 for free if you want to, but updates are a part of the service "contract" that you purchase from Novell, although I think you can purchase updates by itself.

I personally, like openSUSE way more than any of Novell's enterprise products, it's a solid distro with an relatively recent development cycle, 8 months, and is very complete. The one CD thing is OK, but install Kubuntu and no Firefox out of the box, I have seen new users having problems finding the web browser, even though, in theory, there's multiple icons for it all over the desktop (Home, Konqueror etc.).
The reason openSUSE's default install is 3 CDs (No Linc, SUSE is not a billion CDs, it's three CDs, they cut it down to three by 10.1 and newer versions) is because they don't have seperate KDE and GNOME versions, some people asked them about that at FOSDEM back in April, but they found it a hassle to do, and when you install KDE you get some GTK libraries for stuff like Firefox and various other things like RealPlayer should you choose to install proprietary applications.

The one CD thing is a good idea, but I think having a like one or two more, gives you a more "complete" result, and I don't mean complete like "kitchen and sink", but complete in the sense that if you install KDE you also get a few GTK apps for the things that they might do better or are more familiar to the user, like Firefox and Gimp.

Also, regarding the "no enterprise", look, it's not like openSUSE is a tech preview, SUSE do run their QA processes on it, just not for as long as SLE as it has a longer development cycle. Personally, I think the "enterprise label" is misleading sometimes, because you can certainly have an "enterprise Linux distribution" that sucks ass like some >earlier< Mandriva distros (Not saying the newest ones, but some earlier ones, were less than optimal).

I just sure wish suse/novell never did this deal - I just hope it works out for them.

Let's just say this, if Novell distributes ANY piece of GPLv3 covered code, Microsoft's promise not to sue SUSE users and non-commercial SUSE developers, will suddenly count for everyone. I am sure Eben Moglen and Richard Stallman will see to that in person, I wouldn't be surprised if GCC, glibc, and the other stuff that the FSF owns the copyrights for goes GPLv3 the day GPLv3 is finalized. The interesting thing is if GNOME will go GPLv3 before SLED 10.

Did we have to post the pictures? I'm enjoying this thread, but I think the pictures messed up the page formating and I hate horz. scrolling.

Could we resize them? Thanks. I'm too poor to afford a display bigger than 1024X768.

I changed it to just link to the screenshots, sorry about the inconvenience, but you know how it is when you're on your high horse, right?

[Judland]

Let's just say this, if Novell distributes ANY piece of GPLv3 covered code, Microsoft's promise not to sue SUSE users and non-commercial SUSE developers, will suddenly count for everyone.

If I remember it correctly, I believe the agreement is to not sue Novell "customers", not "users". And, as mentioned on the last show, a customer is probably a person who's bought SuSE from Novell, rather than a person who just downloaded OpenSuSE for free.

But, anyway, that neither here nor there. I just wanted to point that out.

[Tsuroerusu]

Let's just say this, if Novell distributes ANY piece of GPLv3 covered code, Microsoft's promise not to sue SUSE users and non-commercial SUSE developers, will suddenly count for everyone.

If I remember it correctly, I believe the agreement is to not sue Novell "customers", not "users". And, as mentioned on the last show, a customer is probably a person who's bought SuSE from Novell, rather than a person who just downloaded OpenSuSE for free.

But, anyway, that neither here nor there. I just wanted to point that out.

Microsoft explicitly states openSUSE on their page on this thing: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnove ... unity.mspx

[jsusanka]

It's a GPL violation directly, Novell does a workaround of a loophole in the GPLv2, which is why they can get away with it, same thing with TiVo and what they do.

I don't see how this is a violation - when I installed the nvidia drivers it came up with a license agreement that said this was non free and proprietary.

Today, SUSE does not include even one proprietary driver, they do make some proprietary stuff available through a "non-oss" repository. Stuff like Opera, RealPlayer, pine and other stuff are available there for the people who wish to use it.

this is what ubuntu does - the non free stuff is another repository in universe and mult-universe. they are enabled by default.

here is a direct quote from my sources.list file

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.

[Tsuroerusu]

It's a GPL violation directly, Novell does a workaround of a loophole in the GPLv2, which is why they can get away with it, same thing with TiVo and what they do.

I don't see how this is a violation - when I installed the nvidia drivers it came up with a license agreement that said this was non free and proprietary.

OK, here's the deal, as someone who has read the GPL, I should be able to detail why proprietary drivers violate the GPL.

The basic concept of the GPL is like this, if you take code from a GPLed program and use it in your program, your program must also be GPL, if not you are violating the GPL, like you would be violating Microsoft's Windows EULA if you sold/gave your friend a copy of it.
This is where you (Not talking about you jsusanka) typically would fail to see where the violation is, because this general knowledge of the GPL is not very detailed. See here's the thing, the wording is "derivative work", the GPL specifies a number of things that would classify as a derivative work, and one being linking. When you compile a kernel module, you link it against the Linux kernel, and when you load it, it becomes part of the kernel in memory. So there's two levels of "act of violation", first you have the linking which happens when you compile the kernel module, and second when the module is loaded, parts of NVIDIA's driver becomes a part of the Linux kernel's data structures in memory. This is where NVIDIA's driver is classified as a derivate work of the Linux kernel, and must be GPLed too. Of course, NVIDIA refuses to release their driver under the GPL, and are thereby violating the license.

The reason there's the GNU Lesser General Public License, or LGPL, is to allow linking to non-GPLed code like BSD-licensed code and in effect also proprietary code. However even when using the LGPL, there's restrictions on what the license of the resulting program can say, it can be proprietary without problems, but the EULA can't forbid the user to reverse-engineer the program or modify the binaries with like a HEX editor or other things.
This is why you can legally create proprietary programs with GTK, because it's under the LGPL. Meanwhile, Qt, is under the regular GPL license plus the QPL which is a very funky license that I can't understand, but I do know a few things of what it allows you to do. Since Qt is dual licensed, when you download it, you just say I wanna use it as QPL or GPL, if you pick GPL your program that is using Qt will be classified as a derivative work and bam, you must release your program under GPL. If you choose to use Qt under the QPL, your program could be under the BSD license although NOT proprietary (The funny thing is that the QPL kind of adds an invisible clause to any BSD-style license you may choose, since you under neither the QPL or GPL may make a proprietary program, you can't make a BSD-licensed Qt or KDE program, the few that there are, proprietary).

If you wanna make a proprietary program using Qt, you need a "commercial license" from Trolltech, which costs you cash, I think it's about 750 Euros per developer that will be using it. I know Adobe uses it for some stuff like Photoshop Albums, Skype uses etc. etc.

Today, SUSE does not include even one proprietary driver, they do make some proprietary stuff available through a "non-oss" repository. Stuff like Opera, RealPlayer, pine and other stuff are available there for the people who wish to use it.

this is what ubuntu does - the non free stuff is another repository in universe and mult-universe. they are enabled by default.

here is a direct quote from my sources.list file

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.

[/quote]
Out of the box, Ubuntu installs a package called linux-restricted-modules, which contains a shitload of proprietary kernel modules, if you don't believe me, take a look for yourself: http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/misc/li ... 10-generic

SUSE does not even make proprietary kernel modules available, they make userspace/userland programs available in their non-oss repository, but that is userspace, and userspace is not subject to GPL licensing terms, which is why Macromedia's Flash license, at least in the US because in Denmark it's way too restrictive and danish law would invalidate some of it's terms if not the entire license, can be as restrictive as it is.

[sulfide]

It's a GPL violation directly, Novell does a workaround of a loophole in the GPLv2, which is why they can get away with it, same thing with TiVo and what they do.

I don't see how this is a violation - when I installed the nvidia drivers it came up with a license agreement that said this was non free and proprietary.

Today, SUSE does not include even one proprietary driver, they do make some proprietary stuff available through a "non-oss" repository. Stuff like Opera, RealPlayer, pine and other stuff are available there for the people who wish to use it.

this is what ubuntu does - the non free stuff is another repository in universe and mult-universe. they are enabled by default.

here is a direct quote from my sources.list file

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.

The annoying part about that quote is where the support then falls. For example the nvidia blob users
wasting linux developer time with kernel bugs, forgetting to mention what was in their kernel. This seems
like blatant disrespect toward the community, almost like saying "hey here's the software, we'll install it for you
but don't come to us when it's not working, go waste someone elses time". They should at least make a visible effort to
educate users on who to contact.

[Tsuroerusu]

It's a GPL violation directly, Novell does a workaround of a loophole in the GPLv2, which is why they can get away with it, same thing with TiVo and what they do.

I don't see how this is a violation - when I installed the nvidia drivers it came up with a license agreement that said this was non free and proprietary.

Today, SUSE does not include even one proprietary driver, they do make some proprietary stuff available through a "non-oss" repository. Stuff like Opera, RealPlayer, pine and other stuff are available there for the people who wish to use it.

this is what ubuntu does - the non free stuff is another repository in universe and mult-universe. they are enabled by default.

here is a direct quote from my sources.list file

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.

The annoying part about that quote is where the support then falls. For example the nvidia blob users
wasting linux developer time with kernel bugs, forgetting to mention what was in their kernel. This seems
like blatant disrespect toward the community, almost like saying "hey here's the software, we'll install it for you
but don't come to us when it's not working, go waste someone elses time". They should at least make a visible effort to
educate users on who to contact.

Just to add something to that, if you report a bug to Linux kernel developers, they will ignore your report if you had a proprietary driver loaded, because they have no way to know what that thing was doing in the kernel, they can't audit or debug it. This the argument Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD (Whom you may know is also very critical of proprietary drivers) makes all the time.

[sulfide]

I don't see how this is a violation - when I installed the nvidia drivers it came up with a license agreement that said this was non free and proprietary.
this is what ubuntu does - the non free stuff is another repository in universe and mult-universe. they are enabled by default.

here is a direct quote from my sources.list file

The annoying part about that quote is where the support then falls. For example the nvidia blob users
wasting linux developer time with kernel bugs, forgetting to mention what was in their kernel. This seems
like blatant disrespect toward the community, almost like saying "hey here's the software, we'll install it for you
but don't come to us when it's not working, go waste someone elses time". They should at least make a visible effort to
educate users on who to contact.

Just to add something to that, if you report a bug to Linux kernel developers, they will ignore your report if you had a proprietary driver loaded, because they have no way to know what that thing was doing in the kernel, they can't audit or debug it. This the argument Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD (Whom you may know is also very critical of proprietary drivers) makes all the time.

exactly. I've seen so many times where people wont mention using the blob until a few posts later, which is after the fact and the debugging time was wasted.

[jsusanka]

The basic concept of the GPL is like this, if you take code from a GPLed program and use it in your program, your program must also be GPL, if not you are violating the GPL, like you would be violating Microsoft's Windows EULA if you sold/gave your friend a copy of it.
This is where you (Not talking about you jsusanka) typically would fail to see where the violation is, because this general knowledge of the GPL is not very detailed. See here's the thing, the wording is "derivative work", the GPL specifies a number of things that would classify as a derivative work, and one being linking. When you compile a kernel module, you link it against the Linux kernel, and when loaded, it becomes part of the kernel in memory, see this is where NVIDIA's driver is classified as a derivate work of the Linux kernel, and must be GPLed too. Of course, NVIDIA refuses to release their driver under the GPL, and are thereby violating the license.

I guess it is all interpretation but I don't consider Nvidia's driver a derivate work of the Linux kernel. I believe they actually called this tainting of the kernel.

Out of the box, Ubuntu installs a package called linux-restricted-modules, which contains a shitload of proprietary kernel modules, if you don't believe me, take a look for yourself: http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/misc/li ... 10-generic

SUSE does not even make proprietary kernel modules available, they make userspace/userland programs available in their non-oss repository, but that is userspace, and userspace is not subject to GPL licensing terms, which is why Macromedia's Flash license, at least in the US because in Denmark it's way too restrictive and danish law would invalidate some of it's terms if not the entire license, can be as restrictive as it is.

when I installed suse it automatically installed my nvidia drivers without me asking - so I really don't see the difference. but with either distro it looks like it will be easy to uinstall them if the user choses to do so.

[sulfide]

The basic concept of the GPL is like this, if you take code from a GPLed program and use it in your program, your program must also be GPL, if not you are violating the GPL, like you would be violating Microsoft's Windows EULA if you sold/gave your friend a copy of it.
This is where you (Not talking about you jsusanka) typically would fail to see where the violation is, because this general knowledge of the GPL is not very detailed. See here's the thing, the wording is "derivative work", the GPL specifies a number of things that would classify as a derivative work, and one being linking. When you compile a kernel module, you link it against the Linux kernel, and when loaded, it becomes part of the kernel in memory, see this is where NVIDIA's driver is classified as a derivate work of the Linux kernel, and must be GPLed too. Of course, NVIDIA refuses to release their driver under the GPL, and are thereby violating the license.

I guess it is all interpretation but I don't consider Nvidia's driver a derivate work of the Linux kernel. I believe they actually called this tainting of the kernel.

I'd actually be curious to hear why you don't consider the driver a derivative work. From what I understand it was once somewhat generic but over time began to rely on Linux kernel inner workings.

[jsusanka]

I'd actually be curious to hear why you don't consider the driver a derivative work. From what I understand it was once somewhat generic but over time began to rely on Linux kernel inner workings.

always thought of it the opposite - integration. but that may be just me and my dyslexia kicking in.

but in a non-mathematical sense I always considered a derivative work as if I took the kernel and wrote another kernel using just some of the linux kernel and then distributed under my own license that is complete opposite of the GPL and/or my work would not be compatible with the linux kernel because I used a my own proprietary compiler. then my work would be considered a derivative work of the linux kernel.

[Tsuroerusu]

The basic concept of the GPL is like this, if you take code from a GPLed program and use it in your program, your program must also be GPL, if not you are violating the GPL, like you would be violating Microsoft's Windows EULA if you sold/gave your friend a copy of it.
This is where you (Not talking about you jsusanka) typically would fail to see where the violation is, because this general knowledge of the GPL is not very detailed. See here's the thing, the wording is "derivative work", the GPL specifies a number of things that would classify as a derivative work, and one being linking. When you compile a kernel module, you link it against the Linux kernel, and when loaded, it becomes part of the kernel in memory, see this is where NVIDIA's driver is classified as a derivate work of the Linux kernel, and must be GPLed too. Of course, NVIDIA refuses to release their driver under the GPL, and are thereby violating the license.

I guess it is all interpretation but I don't consider Nvidia's driver a derivate work of the Linux kernel. I believe they actually called this tainting of the kernel.

I'm a little tired right now, at it's 05:30 AM, so I don't have eyes for reading through the GPL to find the exact wording for you right now, I'll do that either tomorrow or on Monday.

Out of the box, Ubuntu installs a package called linux-restricted-modules, which contains a shitload of proprietary kernel modules, if you don't believe me, take a look for yourself: http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/misc/li ... 10-generic

SUSE does not even make proprietary kernel modules available, they make userspace/userland programs available in their non-oss repository, but that is userspace, and userspace is not subject to GPL licensing terms, which is why Macromedia's Flash license, at least in the US because in Denmark it's way too restrictive and danish law would invalidate some of it's terms if not the entire license, can be as restrictive as it is.

when I installed suse it automatically installed my nvidia drivers without me asking - so I really don't see the difference. but with either distro it looks like it will be easy to uinstall them if the user choses to do so.

As I said, they USED to do this, in 10.0, they installed the NVIDIA kernel modules and the Madwifi driver out of the box, Novell got some complaints about it, and changed it's policies, so from 10.1 and onwards you will not see Novell distributing proprietary kernel modules.

[metrolinux]

Well, I just signed Bruce's petition. Proprietary drivers or not, I happen to like Ubuntu . One thing I will add to the discussion is that you have to go in and instruct xorg to use the proprietary nvidia driver, so the user is still making the decision to use proprietary drivers regardless of how easy it is to get them. It would be different if the installer automatically decided you need proprietary drivers.

[Tsuroerusu]

Well, I just signed Bruce's petition.

Good together we can make a change, or at least we can try democracy until the GPLv3 comes out, and then it's bend over and comply to Novell or loose permission to use newer versions of GCC and glibc.

Proprietary drivers or not, I happen to like Ubuntu . One thing I will add to the discussion is that you have to go in and instruct xorg to use the proprietary nvidia driver, so the user is still making the decision to use proprietary drivers regardless of how easy it is to get them. It would be different if the installer automatically decided you need proprietary drivers.

Correct, but even that is problematic. You see Ubuntu includes all the kernel modules for stuff such as NVIDIA and ATi's drivers in compiled form, now if the compilation is done by you, the user, on your own machine, then it's upon your shoulders. However should you choose to distribute those modules, you're not allowed to do that since you can't provide people with the source code for the proprietary drivers under the GPL nor any other free software or open source license.

It's at the act of compilation the violation begins.

There was a really good explanation of this on O'Reilly some time ago: http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/08/why_binaryonly_linux_kernel_mo.html

And oh, by the way, in the next release of Ubuntu, the proprietary drivers will be enabled out of the box, the X libraries will be included and turned on by default.
I have two problems with this, which are further fueled by Mark's letter to the openSUSE lists. First of all, I think the GPL should be respected, it's not about being a zealot or not, I just think that a license that have tried to guarantee your freedom for over 20 years should be respected, it's really a very fair license.
If the Linux kernel was under the BSD-license, then I'd still be against proprietary drivers, but it doesn't violate the license.
Secondly, Mark seems, at least to me, to sometimes describe Ubuntu as "oh so free" like they are angels and Novell is like Satan who just eate 50 kids or something. If you go look at ubuntu.com, you'll find this: "The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit." and if you dig a little deeper and look at the Ubuntu Philosophy page in their wiki, you will find a big description of free software and how important it is, and then bam, all of a sudden it speaks of an exception of drivers etc. etc.
To me, those two things are really self-defeating, at least in my opinion.

My view of proprietary software is quite simple, it's basically a little hybrid of Theo de Raadt and Richard Stallman opinions. First of all, I think proprietary software is bad for society as it makes for huge monopolies, disallows people from sharing something they like which other (My mom would be pissed if she all of a sudden couldn't lend a friend a CD, or give her a copy as a gift), the business model of proprietary encourages software patents and competition that seems more like bullying that competition. It also takes control completely away from the user and in most cases it increases the amount and severity of security and reliability problems.
Also, I also think the "four essential freedoms" that RMS speaks of, are essential, kind of like freedom of speech and freedom of the press is essential, even if not everybody chooses to exercise those freedoms.

I don't think anybody should be forced by law to make their software free software, however I think they should make it free software (And I'm not talking about free as in no price, but free as in freedom) that's not to say that they should be forced doing so.

[sulfide]

. It also takes control completely away from the user and in most cases it increases the amount and severity of security and reliability problems.

This statement is huge. When we set ourselves up to lose that control,
Linux becomes no better than many other OS's available. The 2year old nvidia buffer overflow was a prime example of this.