Open Insanity

So I've now got a job working in UMB's IT department while I finish up my degree. Odd considering I've spent the two extra years in school so I can get away from working with computers as a career path, but that is life for you. Brushing up on my Linux and BSD familiarity as needed, I've noticed the strange pathology among open source advocates that BLOBs (binary linked objects a.k.a. proprietary drivers or codecs) are the spawn of Satan.

I understand and value browsers, e-mail clients, messaging programs, office suites, and nearly everything that qualifies as an "application" being open source. It means many eyes are pouring over the code to correct what is wrong, and you are not relying on one source for exploits to patched (the three weeks it took for Microsoft to patch the WMF vulnerability last winter was embarassing). It also allows for software to be "forked" and have differing versions based on individual uses. Sure, this can result in some genuinely useless garbage like Flickr (wow, a bloated version of Firefox, that is amazing!) and many open source apps seem to completely lack a streamlined updating mechanism. Firefox just got around to this with 1.5, and as much as I love OpenOffice, downloading a 95MB executable every time something is added or fixed is probably tiresome for people who do not have fast broadband connections. But on the whole, the good outweighs the bad.

That said, I am a bit mystified as to why everything, including video card drivers or audio codecs, needs to be open source for some people. If you read an interview with OpenBSD honcho Theo de Raadt, you'll notice how "BLOBs" are pretty much out of the question. They'll manually reverse engineer anything to write their own device drivers before using a binary. For someone who needs to maintain 111% control over their IT infrastructure, this makes sense. But on an end user level, it is retarded. My lousy Toshiba laptop uses an Atheros WiFi card, so by FOSS Nazi standards, I should just junk the thing and go sit in a corner rather than getting any work done in the campus center's atrium. As much I would like to trash that hunk of junk, that really isn't an option.

This lunacy seems to extend to video codecs, audio drivers, and just about everything else. Last year, to get a lousy Conextant Riptide Rockwell 56K modem *slash* soundcard (yeah...) to work in Fedora Core, I had to download the Open Sound System driver. Conextant actually had a page dedicated to providing drivers for Red Hat based distrobutions but it died out several years ago and was no use to anyone running on a recent kernel. Open Sound System worked, but I had to launch it at the command line every time I logged into the system. Ofcourse, I also had to rip CD's into OGG Vorbis format to listen to music, because it would be evil for an operating system to work with MP3's without having to RPM or Apt-Get yourself into a migraine. I like linux. I really like KDE. I love the amount of software you can get, for free, with the right list of repositories. But this aversion to regular codecs and drivers is crazy. Nobody is handing out video cards for free, so why the fsck do I care if the driver I have to use is a binary? Should somebody pretend to be deaf because some nerd hasn't authored a driver for their specific combination of distribution and hardware? Multiply all those distros by all those possible devices... unless you've got a million people sitting around to write those drivers, it isn't going to work.

So in two weeks I'm going to be installing Freespire on an older machine. It's debian based, it uses ReiserFS, and it actually flip'n works after you install it - which only takes about ten minutes. I love open source software and wouldn't be getting through college without OpenOffice, but to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, "lets hold the psychopath convention down the street." I don't need to be apt-getting W32 codecs when I'm writing a paper, I need to be listening to MP3's and watching the occasional video game trailer to break up the monotony. Or as this guy put it:

I've used Mandrake, Red Hat, Yellow Dog and now Linspire and even Lindows. I believe Linspire has stumbled onto something greater than the original dream years ago. Bill Gates is scared and trying to come up with new skeems to break up the Linux community. Only problem is that we are a FREE community... FREE to develop any type of distro and or app we choose that fits our purpose. I've come across a couple websites already that only works
with ie6, not Mozilla or any variation of Mozilla. So the problem actually lies within our own FREE AMERICA... the same America that was attacked Sept. 11, 2001 by people who thought they had to right to distroy us because we didn't believe in their God. Are those who don't understand our beliefs at fault? YES... why? Because they don't do the necessary research to find out the TRUTH. The truth about Linux is that it was developed to provide an
alternative (Free or Proprietary) to Microsoft Windows. The problem started at that point... some programmers went the FREE route and other went the PROPRIETARY route. Then it snowballed from there because there was no standardizations put into place... now there is, but I feel it's too little too late, but who knows, something just might come about. Since standardizations are now in place for the Linux community, Linspire's stumble is going to
come to light in a BIG way with it's CNR. All other Linux distros will soon see the light at the end of the tunnel and signup to have CNR as part of their distro too.
- Tim Gelvin, Sudbury PA

Actually, I have no fsck'n clue what the hell he is talking about, but I'm sure Islamic terrorism applies somehow.