On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Matt Dillon wrote:
> Yes, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. What annoys me the most is
> that companies actually believe they are protecting something when
> they don't make their device driver source or hardware documentation
> available. It has been well proven for years that the most withholding
> accomplishes for the vast majority of these device drivers is a slight
> delay--- perhaps a week or two, before competitors figure out what
> they've done.
And the big losers are, as always, the people who buy
hardware with binary-only drivers.
It's quite common for a manufacturer to completely stop
driver development once a particular model of hardware
(say a certain video card) is no longer sold.
This, in turn, leads to the situation where the user has
to chose between the following options:
1. don't upgrade the software, because a driver is not
available for the new system
2. upgrade the hardware to a version which has a
driver available for the new software
If you go back to the introduction of eg. Windows 95,
or Windows 2K, you will recognise this situation.
Luckily the users of FreeBSD, Linux and the other free
Unices have another option:
3. only buy hardware which has drivers available in source
code ... these drivers can be easily ported to newer
versions of the operating system and support for the hardware
is ensured in the future
THIS is the real reason for preferring source code support drivers.
Not even the usually higher quality of the open source drivers or
the faster availability of the manufacturer's drivers change this
situation.
regards,
Rik
--
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Trailer at 11.
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