Seeing the light

I couldn't help but smile when I saw Mark Shuttleworth's latest blog post. In particular, this line near the end:

“In general, this will all be fine – actually great – for folks who have good open source drivers for their graphics hardware.”

To be clear - I think this is great. Wayland's a neat technology and it's good to see someone push ahead with seeing if it can be used on a practical scale; it's great to see Canonical being the ones doing it. I just find it funny in the context of all those posts I read every day about how Fedora is silly for banging on about software freedom all the time and not shipping proprietary graphics drivers, and how Ubuntu gets it right by shipping proprietary drivers (and not caring about those silly open source drivers that don't work right). I know Mark's never said anything like that - it's the more short-termist Ubuntu fans I'm thinking of. This will be a nice post to link them to in future...

(I do hope this means Canonical is going to increase its contributions to work on those 'good open source drivers'. I know the X.org team would welcome more hands on the code.)

Comments

[...] Seeing the light To be clear – I think this is great. Wayland’s a neat technology and it’s good to see someone push ahead with seeing if it can be used on a practical scale; it’s great to see Canonical being the ones doing it. I just find it funny in the context of all those posts I read every day about how Fedora is silly for banging on about software freedom all the time and not shipping proprietary graphics drivers, and how Ubuntu gets it right by shipping proprietary drivers (and not caring about those silly open source drivers that don’t work right). [...]
kitgerrits wrote on 2010-11-21 18:38:
I find it a bit ironic that the distribution with the best 'binary driver' support is looking at something that does not play well with binary drivers. It looks like that blog post is having effects all over the place: http://www.osnews.com/story/24029/Fedora_To_Eventually_Move_to_Wayland_Too Reading the following, I'm not sure it is a good idea to jump inthere just yet: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-November/145290.html In the meantime, I keep on ssh -X'ing and XDMCP'ing to my (new-to-stoneage) servers...
adamw wrote on 2010-11-21 22:53:
"I find it a bit ironic that the distribution with the best ‘binary driver’ support is looking at something that does not play well with binary drivers." Yes, that was kind of the point of my post :)