On Thursday 02 Apr 2009 8:21:27 pm Mitch Bradley wrote: > I guess the main disconnect is that, for the FOSS community, the point > of view is more important than the product. The commercial world is > just the opposite. This is too broad a statement and rather unfair to those who have worked hard to get many products to integrate smoothly into Linux. Greg Kroah-Hartman is on record offering free driver development (even for hardware requiring NDA): http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2007/1/30/49154
So the issue is not one of cost, knowledge, skill or NDA but the fear of intellectual property theft. The downside to closed driver development is the increased cost of testing and integration with specific kernels. Of course, public developers will be reluctant to debug or trace kernels using closed source drivers so the entire cost burden will fall on the vendor. FOSS community uses products too :-). Subbu _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel