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Comment by cliffbean | Hacker News Reader

I take a pragmatic approach. I'm cool with BSD license for most of user-level application code, because if someone wants to make a binary-only application, I usually have options I can choose from. But in kernel space, a binary-only driver or kernel means that open source of any kind is locked out of the hardware, because it's hard to write drivers without specs. In that space, the GPL is one of our few tools for getting device makers to give us what we need.

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Has that really worked, though? It seems like, in the case of things like video cards, the GPL means that we have the full-performance, 3d accelerated, proprietary and closed driver, which is the one you're going to use unless you have a moral stance against it, and the objectively inferior (slower, at least) Libre version of the same thing to talk to the same hardware.

What if a working computer is your primary concern, not the political status of the code?

If you care about more than the short term, such "political status of the code" should matter to you. The purpose of the GPL is not (or should not be) being able to say "my code is holier than yours", nor necessarily about having the best working implementation.

No, its main purpose is guaranteeing that all users can understand how the device works, even if they don't belong to the company that builds it. Other FLOSS licenses don't guarantee that in the same way than the GPL does, as they allow modifications to be kept secret. We could say that the GPL is "knowledge-friendly".

In the case of video cards, the alternative would be having only the proprietary closed driver and no open source version. It's incredibly hard to know of such closed systems work by reverse-engineering them; an open source driver, even if limited and less perfect, provides a full specification of the device.

Then you are able to use the proprietary driver so long as you agree to its licensing terms.

I suppose that you are arguing that an OSS driver licensed under more permissive terms would encourage GPU manufacturers to contribute more back to the original driver. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. It certainly wouldn't discourage them from not contributing back.

Somehow I think that if they wanted parts of their drivers to be OSS they would have licensed them that way in the first place.

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