Windows Drivers Under Linux?

sniggly writes "The Inquirer has an article about how Montreal, CA based Linuxant has created a 'compatibility wrapper' allowing standard Windows NDIS 5.0 drivers to work on linux. After pointing to another project allowing windows printer drivers to work on OS/2 the author asks 'Are printer and network card drivers going to become, over time, a commodity with Win32 drivers one day the 'de-facto standard' run via wrappers?"

Comments

Instability

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the BSOD in Windows 2K/XP are caused by unstable drivers. Will using these drivers in these wrappers destabilize Linux as well?

Cross Platform Driver Standards

[hillct]

While on one level it's great to see this sort of standardization, one has to ask whether standardization on the WIndows driver architecture is the best choice. This is what standards organizations are for. While I like OSS as much as the next guy, and things like Wine, or other compatibility layers such as those mentioned in the article are certainly valuable in their own right, They shouldn't be seen as a mechanism for promoting standards. This just promotes adoption of proprietary mechanisms as de-facto standards, which is seldom a good thing.

I'm just waiting for Microsoft alter their EULA to disallow software written using their (presumably patented) driver architecture and copyrighted APIs on competing platforms, in a bid to deter hardware manufacturers from providing linux support by increasing the development costs for linux support through preventing unified cross-platform driver development.

--CTH