although i broadly agree with lee on most things, i think that this way of approaching this issue is unnecessarily confrontational. just flip it around ... why should vendors expose their hardware interfaces just to keep linux' reputation for stability up?
To whom does the hardware belong? Me, personally, I'm sick of buying hardware that I don't have any control over, save to be enslaved by the whims of the hardware manufacturer. This vast gap between what I'm allowed to do with hardware and what I can do with hardware is a potentially crippling factor in the continued expansion of computing systems in the modern world; how much trash is generated yearly by people who decide they can't do what they need to do with the hardware in front of them because they don't know enough about how it works, so they 'upgrade' and get 'newer' stuff instead?
Its a huge issue, and a highly charged conversation in nearly all aspects, but one fact should never be overlooked in this debate: you have a choice. Use binary-only drivers, or use source-only drivers. In the Linux world, that sphere of choice is a lot larger than in the non-Linux realm .. I can't name a single Windows driver, for anything, that ships with source ..
That said, this subject: should be changed 'getting out of the software politics game', because thats what its really all about. Software politics is not the same as software run-time, yo ..
-- ; Jay Vaughan
