Re: What is the "open web" ?

Mark Watson:
> Sure. I meant that some people would like the W3C policy to refer to
> Free Open Source rather than just Open Source.

The term "Free and Open Source Software" (FOSS) could or should be used
instead of Open Source. But that would not result in any practical
difference because all Free / Copyleft licenses are also Open Source
licenses.

More precise would be referring to the Open Source Definition
(http://opensource.org/docs/osd) and the list of OSI-approved licenses
(http://opensource.org/licenses).

>> Neither Geolocation nor WebGL "basically" require closed
>> source drivers.
>
> I believe they require proprietary hardware/firmware to be performant,
> though I could be wrong there. Or this could be true now but will
> change in future (certainly it will change when the various patents
> involved expire).

Well, some manufacturers of 3D graphics hardware certainly make it very
difficult for Open Source developers, which resulted in this well known
reaction by Linus Torvalds last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

But those difficulties are not inherent in 3D.

(One main problem here in my opinion is that there are Linux
distributions which promote and encourage the installation of closed
source drivers for certain graphics hardware and by doing so encourage
the hardware manufacturers to continue their bad practices.)

***

Maybe someone reading this mail is interested in this:

15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
Published on April 29, 2013
Written by Michael Larabel
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_nvidia_15way&num=1

AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support
Published on April 02, 2013
Written by Fatima Sheremetyeva
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_opensource_uvd&num=1

Cheers,
Andreas

Received on Sunday, 2 June 2013 20:52:08 UTC