Unnecessary FUD about proprietary drivers

Bug #381805 reported by Endolith
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Jockey
Fix Released
Low
Martin Pitt

Bug Description

"Proprietary drivers do not have public source code that %(os)s developers are free to modify. They represent a risk to you because they are only available on the types of computer chosen by the manufacturer, and security updates to them depend solely on the responsiveness of the manufacturer. %(os)s cannot fix or improve these drivers."

I guess my primary concern is the phrase "they represent a risk to you". In most cases, there's no "risk" at all. In fact, the manufacturer's drivers will typically work much better than the open source ones.

Also, "they are only available on the types of computer chosen by the manufacturer" is irrelevant. If Jockey is offering a driver to you, then it's obviously available on the computer that you're using.

To a computing novice, this description is unnecessarily scary and might mislead people into avoiding the better drivers for no legitimate reason.

Also, would it be possible to insert the manufacturer's name? Then it would say something like "depend solely on the responsiveness of NVIDIA Corporation", which would help the user make the connection to the manufacturer, and point them in the direction they should go for help.

"If you have trouble with these drivers, you should contact Samsung Electronics for support".

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

Fixed upstream in r552.

The manufacturer's name cannot really be added there, since (1) it's not obvious how to get it, and (2) there might be several drivers in the list, such as "nvidia" and "broadcom".

Changed in jockey:
status: New → Fix Committed
assignee: nobody → Martin Pitt (pitti)
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

Fixed in 0.5.2.

Changed in jockey:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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