On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 03:06:58PM -0400, Lee Revell wrote: > On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 12:56 -0600, Alejandro Bonilla wrote: > > Again, the point is that ndiswrapper is a great project, but people > > uses it for the leftovers! We *shouldn't* buy leftovers or from Manuf > > that don't care about Linux. > > If you are always speccing out new systems then of course, but in the > real world I have some customers who need to dual boot and ideally it > would work on their existing hardware. Linux is a harder sell if people > need to replace a lot of their gear.
That's the advantage of such drivers. I see at least two disadvantages: First, it doesn't encourage hardware manufacturers to support open source development. Linux has only a small market share, but it's slowly growing. Linux driver support does sometimes influence the decision which hardware to buy. With NdisWrapper, the hardware manufacturer can say: "Our hardware is supported through the open source NdisWrapper." Without NdisWrapper, they will sometimes hear that people did choose to buy hardware from a different hardware manufacturer that has a Linux driver. This can make the hardware manufacturer more friendly towards open source development (e.g. by providing hardware specs). Secondly, binary-only drivers have an impact on the stability of the Linux kernel. E.g. during the last years the nvidia has produced relatively many kernel crashes - and I doubt that binary-only drivers for Windows are much better in this respect. The users only see their kernel crashing blaming the Linux kernel and harming the reputation of the stability of Linux. > Lee cu Adrian -- "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/