[conspire] Buggy ATI Driver (and others) Leaves Vista Open to Attack

[Don Marti]

(reply redirected to list.)

begin David Fox quotation of Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 06:03:50PM -0700:

> It may be an important system component, but I don't believe that the
> addition of driver software (even proprietary stuff) makes the underlying OS any
> different, much less a derivative product. In my view, it is still
> Linux.

For most things it does act like regular Linux, but
you could say the same thing about SCO UnixWare or
Mac OS X.

What you do by inserting a proprietary driver is cut
off the mainstream kernel developers from being able
to understand any kernel issues you might run into...

  http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s1-18

...which leaves you stuck with whatever vendor you
got the Nvidia hardware from, just as if you were
running proprietary Unix.  For example, IIRC HP
has an Nvidia NDA and support contract, and the HP
product and service offering seems to make a nice
"Unix workstation".  Customers won't be able to change
the kernel or system software and keep their support,
but they don't want to--they just want to run their
big 3D apps fast.

Most people using the Nvidia proprietary kernel
modules on Linux seems to be dual-boot hobbyists,
who can always reboot the machine in their other OS.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org