Hi, You may have read this already and it might be old news, but what do you think? This is being discussed on EFFI's (Electronic Frontier Foundation Finland) list currently. I haven't double checked & verified any of the references of the article and can not know for sure if it is 100% true, but might worth be checking out if you haven't done it already:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt Particularly concerning detail can be read below: "Elimination of Open-source Hardware Support" Also "Denial-of-Service via Driver Revocation" In other words, the article claims that first of all, to meet the Vista requirements, hardware vendors must not release open source drivers and they must keep anything else about specs confidential but the marketing specifications listed on their web sites for consumers. And secondly in the case they do release the info of some particular card or chip type, Microsoft can at any time disable the card (when next automatical update occurs) which has Linux support or which is being used in Linux with reverse engineered drivers done for Linux which essentially removes the card from market which could mean (if the above analysis is true at all) hard time (even harder than now) to get any support for any Windows compatible hardware for Linux, especially if the hardware vendors get scared and stop releasing even binary drivers for Linux not to speak of yet alone the open source drivers. I hope the reality doesn't turn out to be this bad. Anyhow the question is, how is Linux and particularly Ubuntu (which somewhat prefers open source drivers) going to deal with the driver issue if the vendors will increasingly be closed and further away from openness and Linux thanks to the obviously deliberate "Windows-only" locking implemented by Microsoft? Best Regards, Karoliina --- http://www.karoliinasalminen.com/blog -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
