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On 3/26/07, Matt Lee <mattl@xxxxxxx> wrote: > james kilty wrote: > > On Sun, 2007-03-25 at 13:22 +0100, Matt Lee wrote: > > > >> There are several good reasons to not promote Ubuntu to anyone. > > > > Please will you summarise them. > > Sure. > > Ubuntu:- > > * Promotes proprietary software > * Distributes proprietary software > * Is planning to ship with binary drivers turned on by default > * Believes more in market share than in the free software community > * Is joining forcing with Linspire to make proprietary codecs > available > Surly free as in freedom gives ubuntu every right to do this if they so desire. If we turn around and say this should not happen isn't this the analogy of going from the far far right wing of politics to the far far left in one fell swoop when idealy we need to stop somewhere in the middle? Personaly i think saying thou shal not use binary drivers or firmware or software just alienates people. People want HW to work and often have it already and have not gone out after learning about linux and made an informed decision. I certainly can't afford to just chuck out my graphics card because i can't do 3d without a binary driver. While i do use some non free stuff what i have done on the other hand is help open up an entire wireless chipset. I have spoken to the manufactures in tawian directly, Forget the OEMS like DLINK ASUS etc, i spoke to who they get there stuff from. They gave the project datasheets, they opened there example code for us. We have a driver thats now in the mm kernel tree. I believe i do my bit to help the whole free software thing, and have indirectly helped a lot of people move to a GPL driver from either NO driver or a properity one. I think this is the way to do it, small steps but lots of them from lots of people. -- Robin Cornelius http://www.byteme.org.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html