On Sat, 12 Aug 2006 19:16:56 -0400, Greg M. Johnson wrote:

> You need to get out more.  SUSE took out the wifi driver from 10.1
> arbritrarily at the last moment because it was decided that they weren't
> going to ship a non-GPL driver.  Wrecking usability for the user with
> contempt for the dogma of open source.

Nicholas provided a very good summary of why the decision was made. 
There's also a very good interview with Greg KH (of SUSE) about why
non-GPL kernel modules are bad.  I've talked with Greg about this
directly, and the move makes perfect sense.

It's not a question of dogma; it's a question of supportability.  If the
kernel crashes and there are non-GPL kernel modules in memory, it's
impossible to fix the problem because there's a part of the kernel the
developers have no access to the code for.  It doesn't make sense for
a company that supports the kernel to that level to ship things they can't
support - it muddies the support policy.

In the case of the Madwifi drivers (which are the affected drivers - and
the ones I need to use for my Thinkpad), getting them into the system
isn't a problem - madwifi.org has a channel that can be subscribed to
using ZLM or YaST in order to install them.

Jim

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