Ubuntu begins its transformation

Sam Varghese
Monday, 04 December 2006 04:21

Opinion and Analysis

Microsoft Office 365

It must be noted that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company that owns Ubuntu, has never sought to disguise the fact that Ubuntu will be supported both as a free of cost option and as a commercial offering.

With its sixth release, the commercial side of things will come into focus more sharply as proprietary drivers are included as default options in Ubuntu. Until now, these drivers have stayed in a non-free repository and never been the default choice. Binary drivers for ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards, that enable 3D acceleration, are among those being added; additionally, drivers for soft-modems aka win-modems and the atheros and Intel 3945 wireless chipsets are also being incorporated.

This is not the first distribution to include proprietary drivers. Debian GNU/Linux, from which Ubuntu is derived, does include non-free software but it is never a default choice in the installation. Given that vendors are reluctant to release either details of firmware for FOSS developers to write drivers or source code for the drivers they may write themselves, compromises have always been made.

There are problems associated with proprietary drivers: when the windowing system for GNU/Linux (known as X.org) is updated, this may cause proprietary drivers to stop working. What do developers do then - do they wait for the vendor to update the drivers (as only binaries are provided, the developers' hands are tied) or do they continue with old versions of the windowing system and hold back features from users who are not affected by these drivers not working?

When exactly such a problem manifested itself earlier this year in the Fedora project - Red Hat's community distribution - Mike Harris, who was maintainer of X.org for Fedora, was quoted in Linux Weekly News as saying: "Fedora does not support proprietary drivers at all, and never has, nor has any Red Hat OS that preceded it. Our OS products are not held hostage to the release schedule whims of 3rd party proprietary driver suppliers. Part of the decision of choosing proprietary software, is making a conscious decision that you are held hostage by the vendor of that software to provide you with support for it. That unfortunate limitation should not expand to encompass all users of open source software. If that happens, everyone loses."