Peter is mostly correct about this. Microsoft is not involved in this issue at all. If a vendor does not see a market for their product with a given OS, they just are not going to spend the money needed to develop that driver.
However, my understanding is that in some cases it is not the vendors who write the drivers as the Linux developers sometimes have reverse engineered them if they really want a particular device to work with their OS. Probably true with other OS's. 73, Rick, KV9U Peter G. Viscarola wrote: >It's not anti-competitive, and it's not sponsored or driven by >Microsoft. It's just good business sense when viewed form the >perspective of the hardware vendors. > >Hardware vendors are *notoriously* guarded about the details of how >their hardware works. This includes the register-level details >necessary to write a driver. And this is true for all types of devices >that range from support chipsets (such as Southbus/ICH type devices) to >commodity peripheral devices (like, say, SCSI adapters). They view >their hardware interface as confidential and proprietary -- Sometimes >because they think the interface design provides a competitive >advantage, sometimes because as soon as an interface design is "public" >they're stuck supporting every detail of it, and sometimes because they >don't want their competitors to create register-compatible knock-offs of >their devices. > >The VENDORS are the ones who write the drivers. They choose which O/Ses >to write drivers for based on a cost/benefit analysis, taking into >account one-time cost for writing the code and the on-going costs of >supporting it. > >Vendors aren't any more forthcoming with Microsoft when it comes to >details of how their hardware works. In fact, most typically they're >down-right paranoid about it. > >So, if there aren't a plethora of drivers some flavor of Linux, it's >just that the hardware vendor doesn't think writing and supporting a >driver for that platform is worth the cost. > >There's really nothing more to it than that. > >Microsoft has been involved in a lot of conspiracies and >anti-competitive practices, but this isn't one of them. > >de Peter K1PGV > > >
