[geeks] The Dog's Breakfast: Microsoft Windows Vista

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> Of course, if vendors do the proper thing with the device drivers they
> author, then most of the work of supporting all distributions is done
> for them.  All they have to do is make the driver free to be included
> in the kernel source tree.

I would argue that "the right thing" is to document the device fully- 
enough that the vendors don't -have- to support every platform on the
planet.  Then the vendors can pick and choose, the enthusiasts can pick
up the rest, and the vendor sells more hardware overall.

There are, of course, a few perceived "problems" with this:

    1) "Intellectual property", which makes sense for devices that need
       firmware squirted into them, but a device that can't initialise
       itself is, to some degree, broken-by-default, anyhow.  I suppose
       there's the threat that I'll gain access to the necessary
       fabrication and test equipment and try to build my own network
       card and try to put Broadcom out of business if they were to tell
       me what registers I need to frob to enable promiscuous mode or
       whatever, but that seems like a remote possibility at best.

    2) The big scary demon of poor image.  That is, that if vendor XYZ
       releases a widget, and some overly-enthusiastic middleschool kid
       writes a driver for $freeOS that makes the widget behave
       poorly[0], this will reflect poorly on the vendor for building
       crap equipment.  In the case of hardware that can be killed by a
       poorly-written driver, I can only say "guilty as charged".  In the
       case of hardware that doesn't work at all without someone else's
       unsupported driver, one can hardly accuse the enthusiast of making
       the device work worse!

    3) Vendors can't force upgrades by ceasing to support (as in drivers)
       old hardware.

In other words: suits.


[0] Or, in the case of poorly designed hardware, self-destruct.  Witness
     some of the undocumented registers on the EMU10k family of audio
     devices.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "If we keep our pride, though paradise is lost, we
Elgin, TX        (   will pay the price, but we cannot count the cost."
USA               )                             --Neil Peart, "Bravado"