Michael Dolan Dot Com

Monday, February 19th, 2007

Ubuntu free vs proprietary drivers debate (seems to have) reached conclusion

There was a spur of “confusion” after I thought the original discussion was “over”… but apparently the debate raged on. I see now that there has been clarification by Mark and a matching Tech Board decision.

The ’summary’ is that Ubuntu will ship proprietary drivers in the distribution (but turned off by default) with ’simple’ to use steps to enable them (and the benefits). While Ubuntu guys tend to use Wifi drivers as the example, I use XGL/AIGLX as the example. The rationale is there are certain features of the modern desktop that require full HW functionality and until God/Allah/Shiva/whoever brings all religions together, I think this is the best compromise Ubuntu could make. It certainly shows the split between an Ubuntu dev and a Debian dev…

So in the future, I expect Ubuntu distros will have a much more ‘pleasant’ experience for XGL/AIGLX and for Wifi of course. This does not apply to all hardware though - just those pieces deemed “essential hardware” defined as:

functionality which exists widely and for which there are free software applications that are broadly useful, that we wish to include in Ubuntu’s default install, and which require full use of that hardware.