Problems With Binary Drivers
There are a number of objections to binary-only drivers. These may be philosophical, with some feeling that drivers distributed without source code are against the beliefs of the free software movement, or pragmatic copyright, security or reliability concerns. As part of a wider campaign against binary blobs, OpenBSD lead developer Theo de Raadt has pointed out that with a binary driver there is "no way to fix it when it breaks (and it will break)" and that once a product which relies on binary drivers is declared to be end-of-life by the manufacturer, it is effectively "broken forever." The project has also asserted that binary drivers "hide bugs and workarounds for bugs," a comment that has been somewhat vindicated by flaws found in binary drivers, including in October 2006 an exploitable bug in Nvidia's 3D drivers discovered by Rapid7. It is speculated that this bug has existed since 2004, although Nvidia have denied this, asserting that the issue was only communicated to them in July 2006 and that the 2004 bug was a bug in X.Org, not in Nvidia's driver. Another problem with binary drivers is that they often do not work with current versions of open source software, and almost never support development snapshots of open source software - e.g. it is usually not directly possible for a developer to use Nvidia's or ATI's proprietary drivers with a development snapshot of an X server or a development snapshot of the Linux kernel.
In the Linux kernel development community, Linus Torvalds has made strong statements on the issue of binary-only modules, asserting: "I refuse to even consider tying my hands over some binary-only module", and continuing: "I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem". Another kernel developer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, has commented that a binary-only kernel module does not comply with the kernel's license—the GNU General Public License—it "just violates the GPL due to fun things like derivative works and linking and other stuff."
Writer and computer scientist Peter Gutmann has expressed concerns that the digital rights management scheme in Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system may limit the availability of the documentation required to write open drivers as it "requires that the operational details of the device be kept confidential."
Read more about this topic: Graphics Hardware And FOSS
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