Comment 1245 for bug 1

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 18:39, »John« <email address hidden> 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