Kevin Carmony Responds to Criticism 300
sharkscott writes to tell us that LXer's Don Parris took a few minutes to get Kevin Carmony's response to the large amount of criticism he has been taking over offering non-free software in Linspire. From the article: "Essentially, Carmony's position is that, in ten years of holding out, the FOSS community has made relatively few gains, in terms of convincing vendors to release libre codecs and drivers. In other words, the strategy doesn't seem to be working. Additionally, while some will be patient, most users would prefer to have something - anything - that works in the meanwhile."
It had better be sandboxed. (Score:4, Informative)
The alternative is an extremely strict SE Linux policy, but seccomp is probably better for this job. One could use both at the same time I suppose.
I don't want some spyware crap telling Sony/Microsoft/Real/Sorensen about everything I do and probably acting as a backdoor.
Linux supports mp3, but that's not the issue (Score:3, Informative)
But that's not the issue people have with Linspire.
how it works (Score:3, Informative)
This usually keeps the less-popular drivers alive for many years, though not forever of course. Linux just recently lost support for the PC-XT hard drives that came in 5 MB, 10 MB, and 20 MB sizes back in the early 1980's. (these never shipped with a 386, but people sometimes put the old drives in newer machines) It is unlikely that any of these drives still work.
Linux Incompatibility List (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.leenooks.com/ [leenooks.com]
It may not be much, but it has the advantage that it points out what to avoid, and it's community maintained - with all the hardware out there these days, no one person can know about it all.