Subject: Re: Driver Model
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: jimwclark@ntlworld.com
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
In-Reply-To: <200309021943.15875.jimwclark@ntlworld.com>
References: <200309021943.15875.jimwclark@ntlworld.com>
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Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 14:10:27 +0100
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On Maw, 2003-09-02 at 19:43, James Clark wrote:
> 3. Will the practice of deliberately breaking some binary only 'tainted' 
> modules prevent take up of Linux. Isn't this taking things too far?

tainted doesn't break anything. tainted marks modules so we know they
are unsupported and every vendor, developer and the like can throw your
reports into the bitbucket. The binary vendor has our code we don;t have
theirs so they can go fix it.

As to "too far", the GPL is quite explicit and most people contributed
code on its basis. So its very unlikely that any binary only module is
legal in the first place. There is FSF code in the kernel, merged by
others and the FSF certainly feel that way.

If you want to run a binary unix system I'd recommend Mac OSx - its
rather nice.

Alan

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