Ubuntu begins its transformation

Sam Varghese
Monday, 04 December 2006 03:21

Opinion and Analysis

Hence one could have a situation where some vendors are held back by others - those who released drivers under the GPL or other "free" licences would have to wait until those who were only willing to release binaries update the binaries. It creates a case where every user is held hostage by the vendor(s) who refuse to release anything other than binaries.

Ubuntu developers have rationalised the decision by deciding to undertake what they call "binary driver education." In an entry in the Ubuntu wiki, they wrote: "As long as Ubuntu does ship proprietary drivers in the short term, we should take steps to improve the situation in the long term. We believe the best way to do this is to convey the problem to people using Ubuntu — explaining why we distribute non-Free drivers at all, what the risks are, and what people can do to avoid such hardware in future."

Public comment was mostly against using proprietary drivers as defaults. One typical comment ran thus: "I am concerned whether this spec is worth installing binary drivers. I think we will lose our arguments for free graphic drivers by doing so and also shoot other supporters like Fedora or Suse in the back. A small popup informing the user about non-free drivers means nothing when we give our best to make free drivers obsolete on the other hand."

Shuttleworth wasn't specific when he outlined the changes, merely saying: "The main themes for feature development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu's Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects."

It may be argued that it is time to move on and that software projects cannot be run without being commercially successful. True. But then there is also a counter-argument that once these compromises are made, control will forever pass out of the hands of the developers and into the hands of commercial entities which have little interests apart from their own bottomline.