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Intel to Increase Linux Support, Release Centrino Drivers
jonman_d writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that Intel has promised to increase Linux support by releasing Linux drivers at the same time it releases Windows drivers for its hardware. According to the general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group, Intel wants Linux users to be able to use their hardware as easily, or easier, than any other hardware on the planet." Pingla writes in with more good news: "Intel promises to release Linux drivers for its Centrino chipset at the same time it releases drivers for Windows. An article featuring Lindows (aka Lin---s) on CNet has more." Sadly, the Centrino support will most likely be a proprietary driver, but it's better than nothing.
Sadly, the Centrino support will most likely be a proprietary driver, but it's better than nothing.
I'll take proprietary drivers if it means I can use the hardware I like with the OS I love to get work done.
I don't think it matters if this is a proprietary driver, just yet. With big people like Intel and IBM showing an interest in Linux, its bound to encourage others to do the same. Then with time, open source drivers might just happen?
Many claim that linux is held back by several factors including ease of use, interface, etc.. etc... I've always felt it was hardware compatiability. You could never be sure all of your hardware would work easily, and the average user can't try and go and build their own custom drivers, or even download them. This will certainly put pressure on the rest of the hardware manufacturors, and this could help linux take a few more points in the market share. No, it's not the magical answer, as their isn't one, but it's another start.
Looks like the censors finally beeped out the profanity.
It's nice that one of the giants to adopt this position, but I wonder about the form of these drivers. Maybe it's me, but I find more convenient to have drivers that can be compiled as kernel modules, and diffently from, for example Nvidia drivers, that they're not closed source, and license-compatible with the Linux kernel, so people can contribute in order to improve them, and maybe who knows if they can be integrated in the Linux kernel tree. Maybe i'm being too idealist.
If you really care about freedom, then help reverse engineer the drivers. Several drivers have already been reverse engineered (such as nvnet for example), whats so hard about a simple wireless network adapter!
> Thus far, the company has been hesitant to ship an open-source driver, based on its concerns that showing Centrino's underlying programming instructions might reveal previously unavailable information about the wireless networking technology.
Yeah. Because obviously no other companies have been able to produce wireless networking products. I can see the point of commercial secrecy when you have some l33t hardware that no-one else can make, but when you just have yet another implementation of something that's already widespread and implemented in lots of different ways it seems dumb to worry too much about protecting it through drivers. If the other companies cared enough about your particular methods they'd just get a team of coders to reverse engineer the closed-source drivers.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
It's sad that Intel had to be embarased into fullfilling the promise it made to support Centrino (when they annouced the chipset) by having someone ship a NDISWrapper with their Windows driver in a distro...
I'll believe Intel, when I see it the driver...
I have used several Intel Linux development products for several years. The C++ compiler, performance primitive library (IPP), and VTUNE are all extremely excellent products, and well supported under Linux.
It would be nice if VTUNE would be brought up to equal footing with VTUNE for Windows, but it's pretty good as is.
Then I guess Linux been Free Software does not matter either? I am serious, what's the adventage if Linux is going to have the same issues than other OSes: have to get drivers every now and then from different places instead of just upgrade kernel or distro, "play but do not touch", "upgrade your hardware becuase we do not support it anymore", "we do not like your architecture, just x86-32", etc.
Seriously, what makes it so sad?
Intel can do what they want. They are the owners of their hardware designs and the drivers to make that hardware function.
If it's so sad that Intel is going to provide proprietary drivers, do you get sad everytime you get into your automobile? (The computer under your hood mosty likely uses proprietary drivers to interface with the autmobile.)
There is room for both open and closed software in this world. I for one envision a world where the Operating System is wide open with all the tools one needs to make whatever changes they wish to it and to develop whatever they want to on it. If hardware manufacturers want to keep some or all of their drivers 'secret' that's fine, let them. If application developers want to keep their 'Whiz-Bang 2.0' application proprietary, let them.
Believe whatever you want. I have and still use quite a large amount of both proprietary and open source software and in some cases, the open source software is better, in other cases, the proprietary software is better, even for the same task.
What needs to end are silly proprietary APIs put into an OS by particular vendors to allow their other applications to run like the dickens while making competitor's applications less capable.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"...Intel has promised to increase Linux support by releasing Linux drivers at the same time it releases Windows drivers for its hardware"
I doubt that they will open souce their drivers. So the Linux developers will write their own anyway, whenever they can.
And personaly, as a user, I find open source drivers much more convenient.
Who the hell cares besides RMS? I love using my machine and it has an nVidia card in it. I don't care that their "driver" is closed source, I can play a lot of heavy duty games with it.
It's not about RMS. Open source drivers benefit the development of the kernel, and also the users of the drivers and hardware those drivers support. Remember when the linux kernel was at 2.6, but we had to wait some time before nvidia released 2.6 compatible drivers? If they were GPL, the kernel developers could have incorporated the drivers into the kernel and development would have gone concurrently.
Even now, sticking a closed source driver in there is problematic if there's a kernel panic. How are you going to debug it? What about security? Nobody ourside of nvidia has audited the code. There could be a potential vulnerability that they missed. We negate the benefits of open source if only *part* of our program is open source.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Who the hell cares besides RMS?
That's quite a flamebait-inducing post you've got there...
What about other operating systems? Do we have to badger Intel to release drivers for BSD, and whatever other operating systems might be released in the future?
What happens if we release a new kernel, or decide to change something that breaks the rigid structure into which this proprietary driver is locked?
Releasing proprietary drivers like this seems to be no more than a "keep them happy" quick-fire solution, as this is by no means a long-term solution. And frankly, ignoring the long-term is a very short-sighted viewpoint indeed.
What's the ideal solution? Write your drivers so that they use a well-documented and open API that can always be well-supported, and make the code as portable as possible. Then what happens when you want to use your hardware with a different operating system? Well, so long as your operating system implements that particular well-documented and open driver API, then you shouldn't have any problem. Recompile, rinse, repeat.
Think ahead. We wouldn't be pushing for open source drivers without reason.
what is so secret about them, really?
To use them for your own hardware, don't you have to create the exact same hardware? So no use there, since you have your own hardware...
To use the hardware independet part of the code? Well.. that ought to be a lot of code.
To use their algorithms? Well, there are a lot of code already they can have a look at (without telling they looked at it, if they are evil)..
And if they are to stupid to come up with an algorithm of their own, how expencive would it be to hire someone to do it?
I don't get it...
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
Who cares if wireless is built onto the CPU. I sure don't. Plus the Centrino is outdated technology. I wouldn't buy a new laptop that didn't support 802.11g anyway.
having this drivers open is not only for nerds or geeks to be happy. it would probably help the kernel people to include a better support for it.. possibly having it better integrated in the kernel..
A bunch of people in this thread have already posted responses that say things like "I don't care if a driver is bianary, I want to use my hardware, the only people who care are free software zealots."
Bullshit. Proprietary drivers are a bad idea for linux. Now I have to say, the licensing issue does matter to me. Even if you don't care, there are plenty of technical reasons to avoid them and pester a company to release the source for their drivers. First of all, the code is usually sub-par. EEs right them, they're smart people, no doubt, but most of them aren't programmers and lot's of bugs and race conditions show up. The OSS community can't help debug them because we don't have the source. Furthermore, on a more personal level, most of the kernel hackers don't give two shits about proprietary drivers, because of that, they generally stay buggy and improperly maintained. Intel is a big enough company that they'll properly produce high-quality drivers; however, it is simply a fact that letting the OSS community have the source would increase their quality, more eyes looking at the code, and they would be the same people that have written the kernel. These debates flair up all the time on LKML. I was too lazy to go look for links to specific discussions, if you're interested in the issue however, they wouldn't be hard to find.
- Ryan, who can't remember his password right now, and so posted AC
Intel is announcing plans to release Linux drivers for the WLAN part of their centrino technology from the time beginning. Though there are no facts yet, no release date, no statement whether the drivers will be binary only or Open Source, no information which chipset generations will be supported eventually and so on. See details of the story and How to Get Linux Running on Centrino Laptops at TuxMobil. So don't miss to sign the Linux Support On Centrino Petition! More at the link above.
Totally agree here. Now if only we could have accelerated ati 9600 and broadcomm drivers, we would have clear sailing with emachines's AMD64 laptop.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Read this. Here is the problem. The kernel developers arent GPL zealots like RMS is, but closed source modules are a problem for them. If a kernel module crashes, and it is the propreitery modules fault, then they can't find out whats wrong and unable to sort out the bug. That is why since 2.6 the kernel developers discourage acccess to the kernel. By opening the drivers, drivers can be more stable on your system.
To those who say, but Windows DRivers are closed. They are not to the kernel developers. When installing new drivers you may of had a warning that a driver wasnt signed. A signed driver means one that has had its source code audited by MS for bugs, and is more stable than a unsigned one. Microsoft dosent like closed source (unsigned) drivers, and will warn you if you try to install it.
So if you want a stable Linux, don't load closed source modules into it. Dont take unstabllity for short term hardware support over stabillity in the long term. Encourage companies to open their source, or reverse engineer and stablise their drivers!
found here
With that said, this is a step in the right direction and I hope other hardware manufactures do what Intel has pledged to do. Closed source, proprietary drivers are better than no drivers at all.
It might be a small marked, centrino together with linux, but they are pissing off a lot of people unnecessary. Many of these people have influence in companies buying computer hardware, not only laptops but servers and workstations. Good way to make the bias towards AMD stronger.
My job gave me a dell laptop where I am not using the wireless at the moment (I don't dual boot). I am reminded everyday why the next server will be opteron since I am in charge of buying the new one.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
and now they are in the kernels, and pretty much edged out the eepro100 drivers for intel nics.
So, even if they are originally released as proprietary, who cares, I bet the source will sooner or later be released.
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms,
If they want to make it easiest then they should submit code to the Linux kernel. That way the next version of almost every Linux would support that hardware straight away automatically.
Though it's not an open-and-shut simple approach, one can imagine a closed hardware management layer, driven by an open, developer-manageable O.S. software management interface layer. This doesn't solve the instruction-set incompatibility problem, but it is possible to let open maintainers handle the work they are (very) good at: Accommodating changing kernel interfaces, races, etc.
Linus is on record stating that as uncomfortable as it is, proprietary binary-only software can be linked into the kernel as long as it is not a derived work, meaning not depending on any interface provided by the kernel.
So Intel can preserve their private, secret register settings, providing a controlled abstraction of the hardware, and still tolerate, to some extent, varying kernel interface requirements.
That is so 15-minutes-ago.
802.11g is all-the-rage, there are proprietary (I cannae give ye much more, cap'n) extensions to g which give it even more KickAss throughput and already Intel even are trying to jumpstart "more wireless speed than you would know what to do with" mode AKA UltraWideBand based technologies.
Somebody releasing half-assed (in the sense that we have to rely on them to provide timely updates, because it's not open source) drivers for last-years wireless technology is not in any sense of the phrase "stuff that matters".
On this kind of timescale I expect we're soon going to have our own OpenSource (we worked it out for ourselves, thanks for nothing) drivers.
Intel is a large enough company making enough profit that they could easily afford to provide current-and-up-to-date drivers for their wireless technologies as they release them not whenever they're no longer busy doing "important stuff".
Intel, you're half-assed. Period.
Behind the 8-ball when it comes to 64bit (busily playing catch-up to AMD) and can't be bothered getting out drivers for your technologies.
Here's a clue
Intel, please just plain get up off your fat hairy ass and deliver drivers (we'll live with proprietary if you insist) as soon as the hardware is available on the shelf and provide timely updates for new OS releases (dammit man, it's not like we're releasing a new MAJOR kernel every month) Yours truly The Community (aka Your Customers)
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
The situation is pretty infuriating with the video drivers for laptops with integrated graphics on 855GM chipset. Many of these come with a 1400x1050 SXGA+ lcd display but a bios that does not know how to switch to this mode. (No kidding, it can do 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc, but NOT the native lcd resolution...) Intel has not released specs to let the XF86 developers program the video modes from the driver, so X Windows is entirely dependent on the BIOS.
Result is your spiffy new SXGA+ laptop with Intel integrated graphics can only do a fuzzy interpolation at lower effective resolution. Needless to say, the Windows driver authors had all the info they needed to program the driver.
And you guess what trouble you will have getting the laptop to display on an attached external monitor....
Intel needs to provide specs to the XF86 developers, so that they can provide good drivers for Linux!
Open source is the way to go for software, but it may not be the best way for hardware. There is far fewer hardware makers than software makers. If somebody doesn't like the closed source software somebody has already made an open source version. If somebody doesn't like the hardware being closed source then they can use a different peice of hardware. The only problem with that is there is a limited ammount of hardware for some applications.
Let companies provide us with their drivers in any form that they choose. Chances are they will be better than using wrappers or an opensource driver that does not utilize the full capability of the hardware.
I have already paid for my hardware, be it new or used. If I can't find a driver to use it under Linux or *BSD then I won't buy it. I can't afford a license for a competing operating system, as a result I can't afford some hardware. With intel supporting hardware under linux this give me and many other college students a break on our wallets. Now all we need to do is purchase our student copies of Codeweavers Crossover office (www.codeweavers.com) and MS Office if needed. I have a database class and all the databases are Access so I need MS Office to make sure my databases are 100% like the professors. I would use an opensource program but sometimes they don't save the database correctly.
So let the hardware companies support linux in any way they choose. It makes Linux look more attractive to the average user or company. The more users, the more (and better) software out there.
~ryan
Intel, NVidia, etc. have spent millions of US$, Euros, etc. developing their hardware and software. They need a competitive edge to their products (real or imagined). If they can protect their interfaces, at least for a short period of time, they can stay ahead of the competititon (or try to).
On the other hand, Open Source including Linux needs the broadest support possible. Restricting the O/S to only closed drivers will scare traditional companies away (and already has in come cases, think Canon printers). It will limit the accessibility to state of the art HW and SW. Much of the performance gains in modern hardware are due to the software drivers (graphics comes to mind). If you give away all your software, you weaken your position in the market and it can affect your bottom line.
The primary objective of a company is to maximize shareholder's wealth. Put these problems in this context.
Linux is the best thing out there. Mozilla and OpenOffice rock. I love open source (free and otherwise) software and support it whenever I can. However there is a market for state of the art hardware (Nvidia) and software (Intel compiler, Oracle database, high-end applications, etc.). We live in a mixed environment.
Do you want to be paid as a programmer? Do you want to have some worth to your products? There is a strong market for commercial, closed software (specialized software, industrial databases, custom solutions, high-end games). Not all can be free and open, nor should it be. It is far harder to make money on just services. Do you want programmer jobs to go to India like the mass of consumer hardware now made in the far east? Are the US and Europe becoming consumers and service organizations with few products of our own?
I can't resist mentioning Microsoft in this context. Much of what they do is now a commodity (operating system: use Linux, word processing/presentation/spreadsheet: use open office, servers: use Linux/BSD with Samba, etc.). They are the competition in the desktop, server, and embedded spaces. They are getting scared (think trapped beast). How can we compete with Microsoft with their nearly 100% (until recently) closed products? By working with vendors that can't or won't open their products. By getting commodity and older product drivers released (for example Canon printers - hint, hint). By working with hardware/software vendors on state of the art drivers but letting them keep their core IP if it helps them with a competitive edge (and gets us drivers).
ZDNet UK is reporting that Intel has promised to increase Linux support by releasing Linux drivers at the same time it releases Windows drivers for its hardware.
Pingla writes in with more good news: "Intel promises to release Linux drivers for its Centrino chipset at the same time it releases drivers for Windows.
OK, that first piece of news is nice, but the second one really gets my heart racing.
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Who the hell cares besides RMS? I love using my machine and it has an nVidia card in it. I don't care that their "driver" is closed source, I can play a lot of heavy duty games with it.
[Raises hand] While I am not dogmatic about it, there are a few serious practical concerns about closed source drivers;
Can't use them out of the box; it's another set of steps.
The closed drivers tend to be flaky.
There are few reasons *not* to go with open source...and quite a few reasons not to.
Allowing the code to be reviewed and fixed, having nearly automatic support for non-x86 CPUs, having a much wider user base, and simple good will are reasons to release the source.
In some cases -- and Intel and Nvidia specifically can do this -- a mix of 'firmware' style add-ins limited narrowly to a few 3rd party propriatory parts would probably work. Hiding the source to protect it from prying eyes isn't a good reason since everyone has debuggers and disassemblers...so if they want to know they probably already do know how the secret sauce is made and what it does.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Centrino is a set of 3 chipsets.
Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor
Intel(R) 855 Chipset Family
Intel(R) PRO/Wireless Network Connection.
These 3 parts make up the Centrino, it's not just the wireless part.
There is already full support for the processor in the 2.6 kernel
The 855 Chipset is also supported
The PRO/Wireless is what this is all about. Intel has been saying that they will be supporting the wireless for the last year and we have not seen a thing. The best chance we have currently is running a wrapper for the Windows drivers, this is not bad but not good either. If Intel can deliver a driver that gives Linux users FULL functionality with the Wireless, I know I will at least be happy.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Great. So where are the frickin' drivers for all the Intel USB cameras?
"ZDNet UK is reporting that Intel has promised to increase Linux support by releasing Linux drivers at the same time it releases Windows drivers for its hardware."
:)
So, does this mean that Intel will stop releasing Windows drivers?
Therefore, I think the availability of open-source drivers should help the hardware sales quite a bit, in that people like me are willing to accept somewhat worse price-to-performance ratio for a open-source (therefore well-supported) driver. Considering that more and more people are trying to install linux on their desktop, and most distributions are unlikely to include proprietary drivers anytime soon, closed-source drivers will be a significant minus for people planning to install linux on the system.
Don't underestimate the value of having the drivers open-sourced, Intel...
Seriously. This is not a troll, so hear me out here. I love Linux and I won't use anything else, including on my desktop.
The real problem here is Linus's stubborn refusal to freeze the driver API's. At the very least, the driver API's should be frozen during each major release cycle; i.e. a driver which loads on 2.6.0 should continue to work properly on 2.6.999. If there are big new exciting things that force an API change, it should wait until 2.8.0.
I say that this is Linus's fault because it's well-documented that the moving-target API's are his clear decision. And it's a bad decision. If he wants large-scale adoption of Linux at the end-user level, he's going to have to realize that most end-users aren't smart enough to do their own driver integration -- but they might be able to download a driver off the 'net or from a CD, and see "Gruntle FOOset driver for Linux 2.6" and expect that it'll work on any Linux distribution that includes a 2.6 kernel.
Until the driver API is stabilized, Linux is going to have a hard time finding users outside the hacker set.
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Does this mean that we're more likely to get Palladium aka Trusted Computing to work with Linux? If Intel is interested in making sure that their boards work with Linux, this seems like a good start to keep Microsoft from tying up the hardware...
--
$tar -xvf
Last march I bought a Centrino notebook, only because chipset support seemed to be there, powerstep looked about to be implemented AND wireless LAN drivers were promised to be released very soon by Intel. Now, almost a year later, still no wireless driver and they still say "real soon now". I guess I am too gullible.
Oh, I also believed them that their crap keeps cool. Even at 600MHz (instead of 1300) and doing nothing this thing gets freaking hot and makes lots of noise.
I am MUCH happier with my Crusoe (Toshiba Libretto) notebook. I guess my next one will be an Efficeon.
I did some reading on the linux kernel mailing list and the general concensus between the developers seems to be that binary-only drivers as modules for the linux kernel are not legal.
The only case they sited as a legal binary only module so far was the nvidia video card driver because the driver was not written for linux, it was written for windows and merely repackaged into linux.
The concensus seemed to be that a driver written specifically *for* linux is a derrivative work and therefore must be GPL'd.
Liberty.
This will be a binary only release, pretty much hands down, pretty much precluding the more esoteric and non US centric distros getting a driverset. Still the big deal for me isn't distro, OS lockin because of drivers is no news to me.
I sit here typing this on my Presario X1000 which would not agree to function with the DriverLoader hack. The only way I'll be able to get reliable support for mini-PCI wifi will be to replace the intel card with something like this.
Hell I'm not even worried about the wifi drivers until I can actually get decent battery life. Maybe if the speedstepping was 100% complete and verfied by an intel OSS coder then I'd take this to heart. Until then, this is just more of the same empty promises Linux drivers are "under development" and have been for nearly a year for the wifi, from intel's page anyways.
If you want to play the latest games your stuck with these proprietary drivers. This is only tolerated by many in the community because its either use the binaries are don't play the latest games under linux. btw yes I am aware of drivers for ati's older cards. When it comes to linux and gaming nvidia is the status quo.
Now my main point is this could lead to some problems for us linux users. Like he pointed out its possible in the future that we'll all be stuck with mobo's that don't work unless we load a dozen proprietary drivers. We did without in the 90's and we can do without now. The nvidia, now the Intel, next the VIA chipsets, its a dangerous trend. You tried to deflate his point at the end by saying just the free nv or vesa etc. What about when that's no longer possible?
The way I see it is this. You should be able to install your OS, have it support your mobo chipset, video card, mouse+keyboard, and ethernet card all with Free software. You should be able to surf the web, get email, use a calendar and contact list, play movies and music, and be able to create Office documents all with Free software. Those are the basics. Anything less is a failure. Right now all of the above is possible. Start throwing in a Nvidia card, a centrino chipset, and the truly Free desktop starts disappearing. Right now its the not the end of the world. But if in the future proprietary binary drivers become the standard a Truly Free Desktop won't exist and there will be no point in using Linux. After all if I need binary drivers for my hardware like in Windows and I continue to use all of my Windows apps via WINE, wtf is the point? Just stick with Windows and the closed source model. Throwing an opensource kernel on top of all that proprietary software is a lost cause.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
1. Time lag and
2. Platform support
How about putting proprietary interfaces in firmware instead. That way it can be updated, and open source drivers don't tell you anything valuable about the hardware IP. I don't mind proprietary firmware but frankly, its the reason I bought a radeon 9000 instead of an nvidia card for my linux box.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Until after i actually see the crap they promise. I'll stick with AMD and superior add-on/pcmcia cards that have native linux support.
Intel is pschizo. They "support" linux, they don't support linux. They say one thing, do another. They are, in a sense, merely Bill Gates' and M$'s Poodle.
Boycott Intel until they pull their multiple personality head out of their anal sphincter and actually go OS neutral the way a CPU maker SHOULD be.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Proprietary drivers are not optimal, but they may become a fact of life for newer hardware. Too much of the functionality of many devices (and therefore their advantage in the marketplace) is now in the drivers.
One novel approach would be for the company, in this case Intel, to produce a binary driver and place the source code in some form of trust, to be released when they no longer support the driver or the company no longer feels that the source code would provide an advantage to other companies.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
you can download Radeon Mobility drivers from here (click ati radeon link in navigation sidebar)
It is likely that Intel cannot release an OSS driver, if the driver itself controls a large portion of the radio hardware. This is probably the case, in situations I've used Centrinos -- the CPU useage is notibly higher when using the WiFi hardware then when not.
Software access to the radio control portion of the system would mean users could adjust the frequency and power output of the system -- something which would run them afoul of FCC regulations requiring that equipment of this nature be fixed and not changeable by the end user. And, the FCC would not take kindly to this. Both Intel, and the modifying user, could be liable.
I have many contacts in commercial hardware and software companies that produce proprietary products. I advocate open source and it's benefits as often as I get the chance. For the most part, the message is heard and appreciated.
:) In other words, there are many applications and products out there that just will not work as an open source project. Some products lack the broad consumer base for it to mature fast enough in an open source mode for it to be useful to anybody. Does that mean that those kinds of products should not benefit from an open source platform?
:)
In fact, in a recent job interview with a software company, the following question was put to me: "What process or organization should a product company use to build product on open source platforms?" I thought this was an excellent question and I believe my answer was pertinent to this thread.
I actually don't have a problem with what Intel is doing and here's why. Not everything on an open source platform has to be open source. I know many of us are purists and would rather not hear this, but I believe it's true. One niche that proprietary products fill very well is as niche-filler.
Getting back to my answer to the interview question. I told the interviewer that a commercial software company that wants to build on an open source platform should organize by having a community development group which adds to and supports the open source product that they are using and by having a proprietary development group that uses the open source product to do their work without changing or contributing to the open source product. I added that there should be a wall between them lest you create a mini-SCO fiasco. I mentioned several examples of this that appear to be working. I think a company like CodeWeavers is a perfect example and I think there are many big companies that are starting to figure this out (i.e. how to work with the GPL).
Get ready folks. The Man is coming.
tims
"Ahhhh, best laid plans of mice and men... and Cookie Monster." -- Cookie Monster, Sesame Street
Since I'm running Debian GNU/Linux stable (yes, that's right, I'm on woody), I had to install a newer version of iwconfig and modify my /etc/network/interfaces file to make it work well:
Of course, since ndiswrapper use the Windows XP drivers file, it does not resolve the problems about proprietary drivers. But at least, I was not stuck to wait (an eternity) for Intel to release their Linux drivers.This space is reserved.
Must be why Intel has been writing software for Linux for several years now(including arguably the best compiler available for Linux). Did you just get off the boat?