Re: Gnome-Shell adoption issues

[Clive Wagenaar <clivewagenaar gmail com>]

On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 23:49 +0100, Shane Fagan wrote:
> Hey all, 
> 
> Ive been thinking a bit about what could cause problems when adopting
> Gnome-Shell in the distros. The main problem I see is the hardware
> requirements (I know this has been mentioned before but I mean this in a
> different way). The hardware that Shell needs requires acceleration and
> some open source drivers nouveau for instance dont work with Shell. I
> tested nouveau and Shell started up but the writing on the screen was in
> blocks and not legible. I know this is a problem with nouveau more than
> Shell and can be fixed by using the nvidia drivers but on the CD we only
> ship open source drivers. Is there any way to get Shell working when
> this kind of situation happens? 
> 
> Regards
> Shane Fagan
> 
> PS: its really starting to come together keep up the good work


I am not sure what is legal under the GPL and what not, but I can see a
time coming, maybe due to this exact problem, where during the booting
of the live-cd and/or during the install process one will be asked if
the want to use the proprietary drives/ restricted drives.
If the user says yes, then those repos are enable and the drivers is
installed from 'the cloud'. (A bit like Ubuntu one using proprietary
bits in the cloud like Ubuntu-one storage. So freedom loving people dont
like it, but it is legal so they can do it. Why not A-Gpl Ubuntu? ;) ).

So the proprietary drivers are not distributed on the install dvd/cd's,
but downloaded in real-time when booting the live-cd or as option during
the install process

So if this is legal under GPL, then that is the way Ubuntu will proceed,
imo. (I am not saying this is moral or not, just saying what I think
could be technically do-able.

I am just a end user, so this may in fact BS?