On Wed, Oct 14, 1998 at 08:53:54PM +1000, Matthew Parry wrote: > As Linux becomes more popular the hardware manufacturers will start > giving away drivers with the hardware, as they do for WIN95/NT/Mac. > If we give them the option to release the drivers as closed source > then most of them will. But if we force them to release as open > source then they'll still release the drivers - because market > demand requires it - but they'll release them as free software > instead. It's a matter of whether open source is important. > In the case of word processors, I could care less. But when > it comes to something like the kernel - something that at times > requires fast bugfixes - it is extreemly important.
and don't forget, binary only driver, be they kernel modules, ggi drivers or other such, they will probably only come in i386 version, or perhaps some other main architecture. most driver can be adapted to other arch/systems so this is not a good situation. also most driver actually are only one driver for various similar products, there is no reason we should load in the kernel two different drivers for basically the same chip for example. And with the quickly changing developpment kernels, will the drivers be updated regularly, or will we have only a 2.2.13 driver, when actual kernels are 2.2.21 and 2.3.103 ? and what if the company producing the driver goes bankrupt, or don't want to support said product anymore (so you can buy the newer version of they product who has drivers for the latest version of the kernel). binary-only drivers are evil, and i think the same goes for closed source source drivers. there is an other side to that, and that is that companies would not want to give out source driver for the latest version of their product, for fear of the concurrent, or something such. also there was some speak of linux adopting the Intel made driver standard across i386 unices. But i am not very familiar with it. Or perhaps some kind of arch independent drivers ? Friendly, Sven LUTHER
