Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

Avi Alkalay avibrazil at gmail.com
Sun Nov 21 15:49:32 UTC 2004


On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:09:08 +0000, Mike Hearn <mike at navi.cx> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 15:57:45 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > At least that's the intention. Some people think they can get away with
> > not being GPL while still using and depending on deep kernel internals;
> > well... to be honest the pain is on them though.
> 
> Actually the pain is on the users. You just don't see it.

Developers tend to be a more or less far from users and their problems.
Open Source nature makes innovation and development follow only the
taste of the developers. While commercial software innovation are lead
by business and user requirements, market pressure, etc.

I don't know which model is better. Sometimes I think the second is
better. But I do know that Mike is completely right, and HW vendors
tend to not understand the reasons of "you have to" open source it
all. So they simply don't spend their time working on Linux drivers
because all of this user pain. So if they just say "it runs on Linux"
on their product boxes, because it will be their phone that will ring
when a user buys their HW to use in an extra-terrestrial Linux
distribution.

In the mean time, I still don't have Linux support for my stupid webcam :(

Regards,
Avi




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