nvidia
Lamar Owen
lowen at pari.edu
Tue Oct 30 20:20:08 UTC 2007
On Monday 29 October 2007, Anders Karlsson wrote:
> Thus, Les Mikesell at Mon Oct 29 22:07:52 2007 inscribed:
> > I think you misunderstood. I said closed source - as opposed to Linux -
> > doesn't change driver interfaces often. With Linux the kernel changes
> > continuously but it is up to the distribution what is shipped. RHEL
> > maintains something stable. Fedora doesn't.
>
> The support and the ABI/API stability is part of what you pay for with
> your subscription with RHEL. You pay nothing for Fedora. Stop trying
> to turn Fedora in to RHEL or CentOS, they have different purposes and
> goals.
What Les would like is a Fedora on a more stable (as in driver/module INTERNAL
API).
The discussion always seems to morph here, for some reason. CentOS/RHEL
provide API stability (in general) across the entire OS, down to the version
numbers. Fedora doesn't provide this, for any package, including the kernel.
The kernel's module/driver INTERNAL interface changes regularly, sometimes
for no good reason it seems.
This is an upstream kernel development problem, not a Fedora one.
I too get quite aggravated by this. No, just because I choose to run a few
proprietary modules in the kernel (in my case, it's all vmware stuff) does
not mean at all that I shouldn't run Linux, or even Fedora, for that matter.
Perhaps I'm not even running VMware for the reasons you think I am?
FOSS and proprietary software are not and will not be mutually exclusive,
despite some folks misplaced idealism.
--
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
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