Rick Funderburg wrote:
> Tracy R Reed wrote:
>> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060424164142296
>>
>
> 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.
> 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.
I remember when Adaptic didn't offer Open Source drivers, refused to
assist the authors with information so they could write one. BusLogic
was a competing brand and supplied good Open Source drivers for their
cards. The community started a letter writing campaign and let Adaptec
know that as long as they failed to support Linux and Open Source, we
wouldn't be selling or offering Adaptec to our customers. Shortly
after the campaign got under way, Adaptec became very much more
responsive and now drivers are available in the kernel source tree.
--
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http://www.paccomp.com
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