On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 09:49:54AM +0300, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote: > You have a strange definition of "the real world". In the server > space, if you don't have a Linux driver you're SOL.
How many servers are there in the world, compared to desktops? What hardware do people buy for servers? How many servers do you know of that have high end video cards? Sound cards? Wireless cards? What percentage of servers are Linux? Linux is a major player in the low end server market. There is also BSD, Solaris, Microsoft's offerings, all of which allow binary only modules. > > The return on investment for money spent on Windows driver development is > > around eight times that for Linux. It's hard to justify, especialy for > > high-end hardware where there is a very small Linux customer base. > > Reference, please. You can get a Linux driver for *free* by simply > opening up your spec. I'll turn that one around to you. Pick a consumer device that costs more than $100 in the U.S. and tell me how many you know that are used in Linux systems. The get it for free analogy is pretty lame, How many people develop drivers for devices they don't actually have? Someone has to buy the cards or donate them to driver developers. Then they have to hope someone will develop a driver and not give up or produce a broken driver. Look at the whole OSS boondogle. I have a TV card that has been around for years, but no longer works because whomever decides what drivers stay in the kernel dropped the OSS support for the card, and then dropped OSS emulation under ALSA. They then stuck in an option for better OSS support which does not work. Now I have two systems. One was installed as an integrated MythTV and Knoppix system. It works. The other was based on FC4 and worked until I upgraded to FC5. Now it does not work, I can't go back to the kernel that is in the Knoppix Myth TV package and not one later kernel will work. The irony of it is that the working system has the newer card. It's driver was created by an Israeli (whom I can't locate) who hacked the existing driver. It sort of works, but you have to do strange things to get it produce sound. The older, well documented, well established card no longer works because it's in a system with a newer kernel. I have a choice of building yet another computer to do what one can do, or move over to the working system and re-make all the changes that I did to the FC5 system. It's mostly a file server, so there were lots of system and application "tweaks". Both cards came with Windows drivers which work perfectly. BTW, my VIA chipset USB 2.0 cards don't work under Linux properly. The device works fine using SIS chips on the motherboard of another computer and under Windows XP with the same card. Using Linux, I get I/O errors due to dropped data. Linux is somewhat better than BSD. Under MacOS the cards work with mice or keyboards but not disk drives. Anyone know where I can get PCI cards with NEC USB 2.0 chips on them? > >From the point of view of a Linux kernel developer and maintainer - me > - who actually owns the copyright to some of the code, binary only > modules are *illegal*. Sorry, but what you think does not matter. It's what the law says and what will stand up in court. Do you actually own the copyright to kernel code? Once you submit it to the world are you giving your rights to whomever owns the kernel? Assuming someone does. What about those Windows drivers used for WiFi cards? They are NOT compiled with GCC, they included no Linux include files, they have no references to the GNU C library. They don't even include Linux system calls, which are public information. Yet they are running in many Linux machines in the kernel "space". Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
