451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Where the GPL Fails
Raven Zachary, May 15, 2006 @ 12:24 pm ETThe Kororaa project, a binary installation of Gentoo Linux, has received a note that it may be in violation of the GPL, as the project includes proprietary binary video drivers from ATI and NVIDIA along with the Linux kernel, released under the GPL. The post on the Kororaa site does not indicate whether the note was sent by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), but I suspect it was just a member of the community who believed that she or he was doing the proper duty as a member of the open source community.
News.com had a piece about the issue of proprietary software within Linux last month entitled “New Linux look fueled old debate“. In the article, I was quoted as saying “If Linux expects broader vendor support, the community needs to capitulate to proprietary software involvement,” which I still firmly believe.
What does the Linux community want more - proprietary hardware support or strict licensing requirements? Without proprietary video drivers, Linux has limited chance of being a platform for graphics-intensive applications. Sure, community drivers can be developed, but not for the high-end market. ATI and NVIDIA risk competitive exposure by releasing their drivers as open source. For them, Linux is a business opportunity, and the Linux community should be pleased that they are writing drivers at all, even if they are only available in binary format.
Open source is not an all-or-nothing proposition in 99.9% of the cases I’ve seen. Where it is strict, tends to be politically or philosophically motivated by the individual, not the enterprise.
Categories: Licensing, Linux, Software
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I’ve no doubt that the FSF’s hackles would be raised at the idea of this being a “failure” of the GPL, afterall the GPL is partly a tool designed to promote a philosophical agenda, even if that is sometimes inconvenient. I’m sure that GPL proponents would argue that long-term ATI, NVIDIA et al will be commercially compelled to release open source drivers if they want to tap the open source OS market. That’s the way the GPL is supposed to work.
Intel’s integrated, graphics components are don’t have nearly the power or capabilities of ATI and NVIDIA’s GPUs (currently) but do sport open-source Linux display drivers. Could GPL-friendliness be a competitive advantage for Intel’s graphics efforts in the future?
I also wonder whether these kinds of problems might eventually and finally push Linux towards a more microkernel-based architecture, evicting graphics drivers from the kernal itself and into userspace (stop smirking at the back there Mr Tanenbaum. At the moment even the classic microkernels tend to hold their nose and integrate drivers as a pragmatic way of getting performance, but it may be that as hardware performance improves, we’ll get to a point of disruption where inconvenience of graphics drivers compiled into the kernel outweighs a slightly slower frame-rate.
I expect some interesting little shifts in this space over the next five years.