Giuliano Colla wrote:You're right, but in a laptop using the integrated modem is more practical, with less stuff to carry, and less power involved. Provided of course I do it at my own risk, and don't try to rebutt the troubles I may get into to kernel people, which has more useful things to do, than following my personal whims.
Linus Torvalds ha scritto:
On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Giuliano Colla wrote:On that ground you're correct.
Let's try not to be ridiculous, please.It's not abotu being ridiculous. It's about honoring peoples copyrights.
[...]
But please do consider a different perspective.
I'm an end user.
I download a damn Linuxant driver because the manufacturer of the laptop
I own has seen fit to use a Conexant chipset.
In order to do that I must:
a) Pay a (small) sum.
b) Accept a Microsoft-like license agreement.
If at that point I haven't realized that I'm not getting a fully GPL'd
software I'm really terminally stupid as you kindly suggest.
If you look at the price of a cardbus real modem on ebay, you might be
surprised that these things are really cheap. Sometimes buying software to
support the winmodems is actually more expensive than buying a real modem.
There's no *run-time* sign. But I was made aware of that when I downloaded it from a different source, and I had to agree to a non GPL license. It didn't originate from kernel group and I'm using it at my own risk.However, if I'm not terminally stupid, I will never think of addressing
to kernel people in order to fix problems arising from or after loading
the driver, and associated utilities, even if lsmod doesn't show
"tainted" modules. Kernel people shouldn't even consider supporting the
resulting mess.
How would you know NOT to complain to linux-kernel if there is no sign you
shouldn't?
Maybe I fail to grasp the full picture, but I'd just have ignored it. Please remember that they "fake" GPL only at run-time, not when you get them.That said, I'd like to explain what made me react to the announcement
posted.
Linuxant have figured a Microsoft-like brute force hardware detection
mechanism: they attempt to load *all* drivers, and only the one which
[...]
But I didn't appreciate that the reaction to that mess has been also on
Microsoft style.
The reaction has been:
a) a workaround of the workaround (if you put a \0, I'll detect the
Linuxant string)
Was there anything else that could have been done for the existing fake
GPL modules?
If you download the "generic package with source" either rpm or tar.gz, you'll find the GPL directory populated. I've checked again right now, just to be sure. At least, this holds true for hsf modem, which is the one I'm actually using.b) a lie (the /GPL directory is empty).
I have this FUCKING Linuxant .rpm with an empty GPL directory right on my
hard disk. And this .rpm is signed by Linuxant. So either Linuxant has
been hacked (someone stole the key, signed a bogus rpm and broke into thir
site uploading it) or they are careless (forgetting to fill the GPL
directory for some packages). In both cases I would not trust them.