On Thursday 08 August 2002 04:28 pm, Ben Reser wrote: > Yet so many people here complain because Mandrake doesn't ship xyz > driver for their hardware. I complain when they don't ship it on purpose, because of a "political" decision that could have been worked out with some effort.
> Well the hardware manufacturers know that > their drivers won't be integrated if they don't make source available. > They've made a business decision. They've decided that they don't care > very much about Linux support or that the few people who use Linux won't > mind going looking for their drivers. Sometimes, they don't have a choice. They may have trade secrets or something within the driver that would prevent it from being open-sourced. For example, if nVidia open-sourced their driver, their competitors could use their work for their own chips. Do you think they want that? > So the way I see it is if you don't like the driver situation complain > the the hardware manufacturers. Ultimately they are the ones > responsible for making the driver available. They are the ones who have > decided to make the drivers available under terms that are not really > compatible with the Linux communities expectations. As I said previously, you can't always expect open-source drivers, just like you can't expect every program to be free/open source. Drivers cost money to develop, and open-sourcing them is not always an option. -- -- Igor
