Hi Greg,
I largely agree to this statement,
there are however some downsides if you're preventing driver

manufacturers (e.g. nvidia, ...) from the possibility to offer their

customers proprietary drivers:
1) One big and important point for me (and more and more future

linux-users) is powersaving features on GPUs like powermizer (by

nvidia) and powerplay (by AMD/ATI) or other hardware. I haven't seen

this working on newer graphics cards models with the opensource

drivers to the present day :(
Take an example with laptops: where with the proprietary drivers it is

possible to work 6 hours of uptime, you'll only get 1.5 hours of

battery time on laptops; additionally / or on desktops you'll be

getting a fan which will always run on the highest velocity,

considering the big generation of heat on your lap and you're getting

a very uncomfortable work device.

Isn't this also at odds with the green direction linux is heading

towards right now?
This surely also applies to manufacturers of future linux-powered

devices such as handsets (cell phones), routers, etc etc

if those companies can't use their own closed proprietary drivers

utilizing patented routines they are "forced" to use, they might think

over it and switch to another operating system ...
2) How will this affect performance, if all of those drivers are

limited to an user-space interface?
I'm not a kernel hacker and don't have much insight into the kernel

and kernel-development, so I can only reflect, what I've read:

much of you kernel hackers are supposed to have said (read that on

blogs, forums etc.) that nvidia's drivers are hackish and that it uses

routines which shouldn't be used by this kind of drivers
other voices are saying nvidia is doing this because the linux-kernel

lacks a common interface (yet) which disallows effective usage of the

graphics cards which would result in abysmal bad performance not using

their hacking ...
so perhaps sitting together with those companies and creating such an

effective ...
[ message continues ]

This statement is not "preventing" anything, it is merely stating the

fact that a very large number of Linux kernel developers feel that

closed source Linux kernel modules are harmful for users, companies, and

the Linux kernel community overall.
thanks,
greg k-h

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I think that's one of the reasons of Greg's post.
You're wrong here. If they have patented routines, they don't need

their drivers to be closed, since there routines are protected by

patents. And even if they are not patented, not releasing the source

will not prevent a competitor from disassembling the code anyway.

So there's really no point in remaining closed. Some of them might

have signed NDAs before using some technologies, but by this time,
Do you know many products with closed Linux drivers which are not

supported by at least one closed OS ? If they chose to support

Linux, it's not for your pleasure, just because they know they will
That has nothing to do with open/close. They may as well continue to

use their dirty hacks when the sources are public. That just means that

owners of such cards on other platforms (PPC, etc...) might be able to

build the drivers for those platforms. I think that most users don't

care about the fact that a driver is dirty. They want something which

simply builds for their platform. Also, publishing their dirty hacks

will encourage kernel developers to propose some cleaner alternatives

or to extend the kernel in order to ease integration of such drivers.
Willy
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