On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 18:39, »John« <jns....@gmail.com> wrote: > I agree that having a standardised driver framework would probably not > be a bad thing, but there's another catch - DRIVERS FOR FREE OPERATING > SYSTEMS WOULD STILL NEED TO BE FREE!
Yes, indeed. >> The optimal solution would be if compiled kernel modules could be loaded by >> any kernel that implements the standard, making them as portable as elf >> executables. > Absolutely no. There's a bunch of damn good reasons why the majority of > the free software developers strongly oppose blobs Although I can also the advantage of such a "binary kernel plugin" for the hardware vendors (no need for giving out the source code of their drivers which might be part of the huge effort they did when creating the product), I prefer the law of freedom because of the possible threats. If the code is open source, it can be investigated and checked - at least by those who care most about the OS sources. > The most optimal solution would be if hardware manufacturers finally realised > how to properly cooperate with free software community and either started > writing BSD/GPL/MIT/whatever code themselves and submitting it for inclusion > in the next release of the component they wish to support or at least > providing complete NDA-free documentation and paying some of that component's > developers to write that code for them (because documentation availability > alone unfortunately doesn't guarantee someone's really gonna bother). Yes, they should. As far as I noticed, Microsoft did not bother in most cases of the hardware drivers. Manufacturers of hardware always needed to do that on their own. For Linux there is a whole community that would like to help building the driver together with the manufacturer but: Supporting Linux anyway needs to deal with an additional OS even if they get helped. For many this is just a matter of cost and so they don't care about Linux. What everybody can do: Just don't buy hardware that is not Linux compatible - even if you are not planning yet to run Linux on it. It might happen sooner as you think. Example: I had 2 cases where people were buying new laptops with Windows 7 on it and apart from being overwhelmed with the changes in 7 (they used XP before) they missed their very old MS Office 97 Professional (they still used that because they never needed more. But the MSO 97 does not run smoothly any more (and BTW already does a lot of wrong stuff on installation by mixing up folders). They didn't consider buying a new MS Office license in their budget. Finally I wiped their machines (another 2 Windows machines in the Microsoft statistic that are ghosts) and put Ubuntu on it. However, I struggled a little with the shitty Hardware - because they did not care about it (assuming everything is fine as Windows 7 runs preinstalled - even if on my net the Windows 7 - maybe only on that hardware - wasn't either able to connect to my WPA2 only WLAN). So they planned to use Windows - for about 2 weeks or so. They should have considered hardware compatibility... -- Martin Wildam -- Microsoft has a majority market share https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs