It might not be your decision alone, but voicing your concerns will definitely be a strong signal in the Ubuntu community, as for example Mako’s post.

I have posted this on some blogs discussing the topic, as a member of a local Ubuntu user group, I don’t see bling having more importance than freedom. Most people are normal users and yet they don’t have a problem to do a little work to get their bling going, if that means not to sacrifice some core values. Make this process as smooth as possible and most users will love you.

Thanks for the interesting post!

The problem is so many people blog about this, leaving comments all over the place saying it is either a shame and a violation of at least the spirit of the GPL, or a necessity in order for desktop Linux to ever gain substantial marketshare.

So what we need, really, is not more people like me who could only say IANAL, but some genuine expertise on the GPL.

Personally, I don’t use any blobs for graphics, I just want a stable system, preferable free software. I want to pay for it if I see real value for money. And I have to admit that all sorts of codecs, mp3, DVD you name it are having a great time on my HDD.

But for some reason, the slope you described just doesn’t feel good. Free software, also called open source, was meant to be fixable by the user. Now if you have this nVidia blob, and you do happen to get a kernel panic and stuff crashes, there’s no way you can understand what’s really going on.

So people should not get pampered too much, I think. Let them choose the right hardware (Apple users do!), let them use open source drivers, and if they really want, well give them the blob. But offering the blob in an easy way and saying in a sidenote “this blob might hurt you, we couldn’t tell”, that’s not really my idea of a quality distribution.

* Official ATI representatives state the ATI proprietary doesn’t supports Composite, and thus, this driver will only be enabled by default for users whose video boards are not supported by the open source ‘ati’ video driver. For these users, 3D acceleration will be supported, but Composite will be explicitly disabled in the X.Org configuration file

I don’t believe that enabling a non-free driver where there’s no free alternative is a change in our policy, so this can be ignored.

“I’m talking, of course, about the NVIDIA binary X driver. (Some reports/blogs/etc. indicate we’re also considering the ATI fglrx driver, this isn’t true – that driver doesn’t support AIGLX, so it’s not being considered.)”

But https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AcceleratedX states clearly: “Both NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers will be installed by default, on Ubuntu Feisty. That does NOT mean they will be enabled for all video boards, but, instead, they will be enabled on a per-board case, as explained below”

Please explain, I am now very confused. ?

I write off arguments that make use of it.

You think Linux would be as good today if the commercial distributions weren’t doing any develoment ?
Is Ubuntu the Microsoft of Linux ? ( cf QDOS and Bill Gates. )

What will you do if Novell dies ? You included F-Spot and tomboy in your distribution. Would you pay the Mono developers as Novell is doing today ?
Will you pay the guy that did so much work for the x86-64 platform ? will you pay Greg Kroah-Hartman ?

Mark Shuttleworth making fun of Novell sounds so bad in the mouth of someone who’s not really working upstream, who’s draining the blood of debian and who doesn’t care about the proprietary drivers issue.

To put it another way- there are two axes here- one is how much non-free software is included in the distro; the other is how actively we push to make new users aware of the value of libre. In the past, we’ve mostly been fairly happy to downplay *advertising* libre as long as the software itself was libre- I think we mostly figured that people would come around once they started using it. As we increase the amount of non-libre or dubiously-libre software, though, we may have to revisit that decision, and more actively promote libre to make up for the unfortunate compromises we’re making elsewhere. I’m not sure how to make that balance, though.

disagree. he just describet the NVidia use POV. This about the same as complaining why ones Zune is not properly working on Ubuntu.

If you decide against free drivers when you buy hardware, its logigal that you have a harder time in getting it to work. (i.e. having to install the nvidia driver manually)

You could have chosen an Ati <=X800 or Intel onboard instead.
Those two together make the majority on the market btw.
So you are going to sacrifice freedom just to make some NVidia users happy…
(comprehensible, since you are one yourself)