On Tue, 20 Jan 2004, Don Levey wrote: > Let me start off by saying that I salute the long and hard work that > developers everywhere put into their products. I am not a developer, nor do > I play one on TV. I'm just a professional user and tech support person. I > like to think I have above-average skills and experience, along with the > ability to relate to the "typical" computer user. > > Yeah, it was all free - and I'm not asking for my money back. The question > I continually have is "what is the long-term goal of Linux and the > open-source community?" Is it a hobbyist OS? Is it something which is > content to remain in the domain of techno-geeks? Or is this something which
Microsoft does not write all of the drivers for all of the diverse and divergent software out there. Windows would be in a much worse shape than Linux if it did for drivers. It is the manufacturers themselves who write the drivers and make sure that the driver works on most (some) of the Windows variants. To ask Linux to take over the role of all of those manufacturers is very difficult and one will always be playing catchup. So, the job has to eventually be downloaded onto the manufacturers. There are two problems. One is the relative fludity of Linux. What is compiled for one kernel will not necessarily run on another, even in the same major series. The second is that may businesses are leary of open source, and thus do not want to write drivers which can be recompiled for each new kernel. They want to write once and forget about it. This, especially since these are kernel level modules, means that Linux needs a way of ensuring that modules can be compiled once and they will then work on at least all of the same major kernel series (eg, 2.6.x) While we might like it is all manufacturers embrased open source, that is not the world we live in nor the world the users live in. > strives for widespread acceptance in the broader business world, to be (if > not on the desktops) on the approved list of every manager out there? Is > this something that is meant for my mother to use to check her email, surf > the web, and play videos of her grandkids? > > If the latter, then we're not there yet. In many ways, we're not even > close. For all we say about proprietary software, OS, etc, they have > created an expectation that things *work*. While I'm happy to answer Yes, but the responsibility is shared and is largely borne by the manufacturers. If a sound card does not work with say Windows 2000 it is the manufacturer that gets the steam, not Microsoft. ------------------------------------------------------- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
