In another thread, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton [2010-11-21 21:11 +0000]: > >Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > > > >> apologies for making a copy of the post which was made at > >> forums.arm.com but the last message asking ARM to state their position > >> clearly regarding proprietary and NDA-encumbered supply of critical > >> system libraries was censored. > > > > Sorry I seem to be missing something obvious, but what does this > > have to do with porting Debian to ARM and other embedded processors? > > excellent question - j. i'm removing your name from the message in > case you wanted to remain anonymous, and bcc'ing you, but i'm > reinstating the cc to the lists because i feel that it's important.
Luke - you are quite right that free GPU drivers is important, in the same way that free software in general is important, and that currently the whole ARM embedded graphics area is a disaster area with 5 competing implementations _all_ of which are non-free. However posting your rant as the first mail after the announcement of this kind sponsorship in the embedded/ARM Sprint therad was just rude. One should at the very least pause to say 'thank you', before launching into a diatribe otherwise one tends not to get invited again. So I've moved this discussion to a new thread. I hope people will reply here rather than there. > I couldn't pass up the opportunity to raise this with ARM. Sure, but the debian-arm list is not 'raising this with ARM' - it's raising it with the Debian arm porters. Are you coming to the Sprint? Thre will certaqinly be people there you can talk to about it, but you'll find they all agree already - not much to argue about. The people who are the problem won't be there - they are lawyers and managers and marketing types who definately don't read this list. And the other thing you need to understand is that we have a huge pile of work to do to deal with arm architecture variants in binary distributions which has just about _nothing_ to do with GPUs. So there is no danger of us polluting ourselves with non-free drivers in order to work on the arch. Debian principles in this area are well established and well understood. ARM is a big enough outfit that there is a nice Free-Software-oriented bit which does helpful things like provide us with a nice place to run this event, and there are nasty proprietary bits that make all sorts of proprietary stuff, along with a huge legal dept that issues unreasonable edicts, and does its best to prevent even fair competition, and has in the past aquired some very embarassing software patents (they promise they've stopped doing this now by explicitly restriciting their patents to hardware implementations - I have yet to see an example confirming this). You'll find that most of the people in the 'right thinking' bits of ARM agree with you about MALI, and rest assured that there is significant pressure to free it up, both externally and internally: every time there is an internal presentation about how cool it is, what they mostly get in response is complaining about how it's a fat lot of use in Linux with only proprietary drivers, and I see signs of definite (if slow) progress here. People understand that it's deeply unpopular in some quarters and there there is potential competitive advantage in opening up. But there is also legal risk, and those lawyers are nothing if not risk averse. I see strong hints that at least one GPU vendor will provide design info soon so that 3rd party drivers can be written. They are too scared to hand over their own code, but seem OK with 3rd-party free drivers being written. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-arm-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20101121215524.gh28...@dream.aleph1.co.uk
