Slashdot Mirror
Extensive Coverage of Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006
cdlu writes "LWN and NewsForge both extensively covered the goings-on at this year's OLS. NewsForge: day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4. LWN (subscription required for most): article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4." I especially enjoyed the description of reverse engineering a USB device from cdlu's coverage of day 3; one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux! Update: 07/25 04:57 GMT by T : Eric Preston, who delivered that talk on reverse engineering USB devices, kindly linked to both his slides and the accompanying screenshots.
You know, I used to think just like this -- though I didn't consider it 'whining', I worried about the practice, thinking it might just put the vendors off.
And then I watched the OpenBSD project flame the hell out of a Hifn representative for asserting that his company provided 'open documentation' (when in fact acquiring said documentation required registration that the OpenBSD developers felt violated their privacy). When I first read the systematically harsh response to the Hifn representative (including Theo's threat to drop the free driver from the OpenBSD tree), I was absolutely stunned that a group of free software developers would be so reckless.
But it got me thinking... we can't all bend over and ask for it from the vendors forever. Linux marketshare is growing in every segment, and we do have an increasing amount of support from giants like IBM. If it were possible for the projects to take a unified stance (across Linux and the three *BSDs) and persistently demand programming specifications from the vendors, what's going to happen -- they're going to say "fuck you for asking" and drop their binary drivers too?
Something tells me that giving your customers the finger, even if it's only an operating system or two only represent 6-10% of your desktop market, isn't the sort of thing you do to appease shareholders. So while they might not respond immediately, it's not like we're losing anything.
I'm thinking we should start a unified petition to AMD now that they're acquiring ATI - form an online petition to AMD that says "We are NVIDIA customers who will eBay our GPUs tomorrow and buy ATI if you release open drivers".