begin quoting Rick Funderburg as of Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 11:10:13AM -0700: [snip] > Unfortunately, a lot of what is described in the article may be > inevitable. Freedom-loving Linux distributions do not have the market > share to force many hardware providers to release open source drivers.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I find the idea that _forcing_ anyone to do anything to be worthy of considerable suspicion. Sure, you force 'em to do worthy things, perhaps... > Also, when there aren't any vendors with open source drivers, how does > the market vote for the open one? Why, even, would the market vote for > the open one? As the article states most people would benefit (int the > short term) from choosing the a closed source version. The market typically doesn't vote very well. Short-term thinking is normal. The market *should* demand that every piece of hardware come with a full specification sheet and a programming manual; most of 'em won't know what to do with such a thing, but that's okay, it doesn't mean they shouldn't make it part of their requirements. But that adds additional cost. And so most folks go with something cheaper. . . -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
