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USB 2.0 for Linux Coming Soon
itwerx writes "There's an article on MSNBC about USB 2.0 support in Linux. Interesting to see that the open source community is less than a year behind the most powerful software company in the world in supporting it. Does that make us the second most powerful now? :)"
Actually, it makes us less than a year behind. Why? Because this article is incorrectly assuming that the 2.4.19 final release is the first time anyone sees any Linux USB 2.0 support.
There has been a stable USB 2.0 patch for well over a year, it has been in the 2.5 kernel since it forked and it's been in 2.4 for a while, albeit under the "Experimental" heading or waiting for the final 2.4.19 kernel to be released.
Like you mentioned, the biggest problem with adding support for USB 2.0 was the lack of devices. The vast majority of development was done with one USB 2.0 controller and one USB 2.0 device. Both were prerelease versions with a whole slew of bugs to workaround.
The reason why you see Itanium support being so mature was because of the priorities of Intel, not of the community. Intel (and HP) sunk a significant amount of money into getting Linux ported to Itanium. Why? Because it's a billion times harder than USB 2.0 support and much more fundamental and thusly important to have supported as early as possible.
> Microsoft hasn't been bashing Linux so much anymore. It sees important opportunities there...
.Net, to develop for it, and to become dependent on it. That includes building ties to Palladium.
.Net .Net support (lock-in) in Qt
> Anyway, they've been changing their atitude towards Linux and Open Source.
That's the biggest BS I've ever heard. Gates and Ballmer still run the company, and they are no more honest now than in the past.
It was just a few months ago that evidence came about that showed how Microsoft pressured Dell into dropping support for desktop Linux:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24478.html
If Microsoft is being quieter now, it's because they want something -- something that requires less hostility from Linux developers.
What Microsoft wants right now is for companies and developers to accept
This is consistent with Microsoft's earlier behaviour.
For example, once Microsoft had their polluted J++ version of Java in place, their strategy became the following:
> "At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps." http://java.sun.com/lawsuit/051498.unfair.html
Microsoft tried a similar "keep quite and let everyone lock themselves in" strategy with Bristol's Wind/U (Windows APIs on Unix), which tended to lock Unix applications to Windows servers.
So of course Microsoft would like things to quiet down right now. It's because they've already set the traps that they hope will capture Linux and the Internet.
These traps include:
-
- Palladium
- Windows Media protocols over the Internet
- Palladium support for Apache
- MS Office lock-in on Linux (Crossover)
- ActiveX lock-in on Linux (Crossover)
-
- ActiveX support (lock-in) in Konqueror
- Windows Media lock-in on Linux (mplayer)
- Hardware partnership with AMD (kept API details secret, making Linux unstable)
- Hardware partnership with NVidia (closed source driver tied into Linux kernel)
- Hardware lock-in through NVidia (their new graphics language compiler)
- Attempted government-mandated IP-security-hardware lock-in
Actually, now that I think about it, that last one is a killer. In order for Microsoft to get Congressmen and Senators on their side, it is very important to reduce the political risk, by making Microsoft seem more benign. Thus, if Microsoft can succeed in keeping the Linux supporters quiet, then more government officials will be willing to accept the payoffs, excuse me, campaign contributions that Microsoft has offered, in exchange for selling out the American people. It would be a pretty sweet deal for Microsoft to have a law that requires the use of Microsoft technology in every computing device.