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Update On Free Linux Driver Development
Remember the offer Greg Kroah-Hartman made earlier this year, to get Linux drivers written for free for any company that wanted them? Now an anonymous reader points us to an article up on linuxworld with an update to this program. Greg K-H, who leads the development of several kernel subsystems including USB and PCI, admits that the January offer was a bit of "marketing hype" — but says it has brought companies and developers together anyway. Twelve companies have said "yes please," one driver is already in the kernel, and five more are in the pipeline.
A list of the twelve companies, please?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Marketing hype or not, I'm always happy to see more hardware supported by free drivers. Thanks, Greg.
the volunteers write them without charging the OEMs, yes.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The marketing hype was the fact that the kernel developers would do this sort of development anyway. This isn't a special program of any kind, it's standard procedure and they were promoting it somewhat like other people promote special "one time offers" and such. So yes marketing hype, and yes they do in fact do that. The helpful part is they have actual hardware samples and/or specs to work with, so it's a real win all around.
1. They're loadable modules.
2. You should maybe leave the kernel development to the kernel developers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
who wants to fuck around doing all that just to play some mp3's or print a letter?
Someone does. If I'm bored, I do. And only one person has to fuck around, come up with a fix, submit it upstream and get it merged for everyone else to have their problem solved.
It's very liberating to be able to fix your own problems instead of being at the mercy of a vendor who doesn't care.
one developer = Theo de Raadt.
competing open source operating system = OpenBSD
criticized = profanity
So to rewrite the sentence so it actually make sense:
While Theo de Raadt, has slung profanities at the NDA approach, he is free to write a driver for OpenBSD if he wants by using the Linux driver as documentation, but he best not copy any of the code from the Linux driver if he wants to avoid having to GPL it (which he almost certainly does).
Which makes this comment: "The drivers are generally better written than the specs," Kroah-Hartman says. make a lot more sense. But what the hell, I'll translate that too:
Theo, stop moaning about specs.. these companies are not going to give us blueprints to the damn hardware.. and whatever they do give us is going to be confidential. That's the reality. Deal with it. If you refuse to enter into a non-disclosure agreement with these companies then don't complain when the only documentation you have is a Linux kernel driver. The specs aint that great anyway.
Or, at least, that's what I read.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Uhhh.. no he wasn't. He wasn't lying at all.
Why would you feel the need to post a "translation" when you have no idea what you are talking about?
The fact that people are willing to write Open Source software without charging a fee for their services is hardly a new concept, but Greg did the smart thing of treating it like it is and, in doing so, attracted the attention of people who thought that it wasn't the case.
This was one of the biggest problems with the Free Software movement before Open Source came along.. no-one talked about the benefits that businesses could get from the community. For a while, no-one talked about anything else, and then it went quiet again. RMS will tell you that we need to talk about freedom. I happen to agree, but we also need to talk about the practical advantages of open software development too.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I wasn't able to get a printer working under Windows XP 64 bit Edition for about 9 months. Only last week did I figure out how to force windows not to try to use the drivers from the print server (which is 32 bit XP) and to stop it from overwriting the 64 bit drivers with the 32 bit ones. I guarentee it is because the date-time stamps on the drivers were out of wack.. in 3 weeks time they'll probably magically stop working again.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Your point draws exactly the opposite conclusion to that of the GP, who says:
[emphasis mine]
FOSS has worked this way from day 1. And it continues not only to work, but to prove itself superior in many ways to proprietary software approaches. It particularly excels at dealing with software quality. In FOSS, code quality is one of the core metrics[*] of the value of a project, whereas security, debugging and testing are dealt with as externalities (i.e. cost centres to be minimised) by many proprietary software makers. Drivers are a perfect place to make significant investments in FOSS, because then hardware vendors won't be stuck owning the entire problem, and innovative uses of their products will allow them to sell into niches that they never could have afforded before.
----
[*] This is not to say that all FOSS software is quality software. Just like everything else in the world, 95% of it is crap. But the best FOSS software is very high quality indeed in terms of stability, resource usage and suitability to the task.
----
Is Linux ready for the desktop? In managed environments, the answer is an emphatic yes. Ease of administration is many times greater under Linux than under the other offerings, and this means that in-house support and developers can focus on making things better rather than simply fighting fires. A number of organisations have discovered this, and more will do so in the months and years to come. I think time will show that document formats are not nearly the bugbear that people currently think them to be.
Is Linux ready for the desktop at home? It's ready in potentio, but it will take time for vendors to work out how to package it on new machines. This will be a tough slog, not for technical reasons, but because Microsoft will do its very best to ensure that they have every incentive not to move from a Windows-only sales model. Having open source drivers provides one more bit of leverage against this inertia.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Seriously, I don't know crap about kernel development, but:
1) I knew the answer to your question since the first time I even tried to compile a kernel. By "compile a kernel", I mean run make menuconfig, flip through idiot proof menus and say yes when it tells me to.
2) You proposed a bunch of dumb ideas implying that the people who actually do know how to develop one are idiots.
3) asking questions in a dick way and then appending a question mark in no way indicates humility, or even politeness.
Seriously, asking dumb questions is fine, but *you* need to actively treat them as dumb questions if you want them to be treated as legitimate questions in a problem space in which you're ignorant. Don't treat the people you want answers from as dumb preemptively.
until basic basic shit like this works without a problem, pushing the linux desktop is a wasted effort.
This stuff nearly all works without a problem on my Linux desktop -- Suse, which is quite a nice distro regardless of what you think of their parent Novell. I've certainly had a hell of a lot fewer problems with plugging and playing stuff into a Linux box than with Windows (got driver disks for that? that support your particular version? and don't require you to download something from Microsoft's web site that ends up requiring you to register for Windows Genuine Advantage?). By that measure, Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
-- Alastair
Your attitude sucks, my friend.
Sure, we more experienced Linux users know that we have to choose hardware very carefully sometimes in order to ensure that it's supported by Linux. But the poster has asked a perfectly reasonable question and you say that he's whining - this is hardly a good way of encouraging people to try Linux out, is it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Yeah right. You can request your money back and ask for technical support all you want, but when exactly was the last time you actually received your money back or useful technical support from Microsoft?
...And do you have some delusion that Microsoft is focused 100% on getting everyday usage right? Then why is it that nearly every home user's Windows box that I see is constantly alerting about the security updates they haven't downloaded? And why do these users complain about the problems their computers give them instead of rejoicing with the ease and perfection of having a 100% everyday usage oriented OS?
As a simple example, a couple weeks ago, when I was visiting a realtor, she tried for 5 or 10 minutes to get her computer to bring up some MLS site, and was about to give up before I had to step in and get her connected to the office's wireless network. If Windows is such an ideal, usable operating system, why would the user have such a problem? Should she have called Microsoft, would they have walked her through getting the system on the network?
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.