100 percent free source desktop is 100 percent...the wrong question
There's a debate raging over on Slashdot about whether an open-source, Linux desktop should be "pure" or whether it should allow proprietary drivers, applications, etc. I know I've helped to foment discussions like this before, but to me the answer to this question is blindingly simple:
No. No, the Linux desktop need not be 100 percent free source.
It's a laudable aspiration, but it's also not something that is practical. It's not a question of whether or not one could conceivably come up with a perfectly free (as in freedom) Linux desktop, but no one has done so yet, so why bother?
Besides, as one Slashdotter rightly notes,
The choice should be with the user, not with the distribution.
Because of the way Linux is architected, a user can make that choice. That's the way it should be, but let's not get bogged down in figuring out how many open-source applications will fit on the head of a pin.
For me, it's not a matter of religious dogma: I use open source because it often works better. On the desktop, that means Adium over iChat or AIM, Zimbra over Exchange, and so on.
But it also means NetNewsWire for RSS, Skype for VOIP, and iTunes for music. Should I care that these are proprietary applications? Maybe I would if the stakes were bigger, as I believe they tend to be for enterprise-wide deployments of CRM, ERP, etc.
But for my desktop, the only one that gains or loses based on my choices of applications is me. I use what works. Hurray! when "what works" is open source. I don't shed tears when it's not.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
- by pythonwannabe July 14, 2008 11:53 PM PDT
- Well, after using Linux on the desktop for a couple of years now, I find it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand it provides me with access to devices such as my Nvidia Graphics card - to enable me to play games utilising the 3D graphics performance of their cards.
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(5 Comments)On the other hand, I generally find most of the problems I have on the Linux desktop are with proprietary apps such as Adobe Flash or Java. Although, I will say it's getting easier to install these apps these days, it takes a hell of a lot longer to get bugs resolved or for the application to be ported to a different architecture, such as 64bit. As an example, I am not even sure if Adobe Flash works on the PPC arch yet, so you can't play YouTube in YellowDog Linux on the PS3. Can 64bit Linux use WMV files yet?
In an ideal world, I would like to see as much Open Source software on Linux as possible, but until there is more market share, you're not likely to see this... so in the meantime, it might be worth setting aside the purist approach (at least for the mass-market) until there is enough persuasion in the market for Linux to demand either better support from proprietary vendors (ATI drivers are a good example of this), or open up their code and embrase the fuzzy warm light of OSS. :)
I appreciate distros like Ubuntu that make it easier to get proprietary software working, too... installing codecs is way easier these days than it has been in the past. :)