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Creative Vista Driver Modder Speaks Out
hol writes sends a followup on Creative Labs shutting down the modder who made their drivers work with Vista. Wired is running daniel_k's response to the contretemps."
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Nope. Just stay away from Vista. :)
We -- and I think I speak for the majority of Linux users here -- don't want binary drivers in Linux.
I sincerely doubt you're speaking for even a sizable minority of Linux users, let alone a majority. Most people are far, far more interested in their hardware working than they are about idealism.
You can't fix a binary driver, nor can you make sure it's not doing something evil.
Nor can you, I'm willing to bet, with an open source driver. You have to trust someone else to do it for you.
You can't migrate the code to future versions as the kernel is modified.
Nor do you need to with a stable interface.
You can't optimize it. We don't want an endless stream of support for old pieces of hardware, or a fixed-in-time ABI that keeps things from maturing. An ABI freezes progress.
Tripe. Pretty much the only OS today that doesn't have a stable ABI is Linux. Solaris, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, etc. All somehow manage to do it without "freezing progress".
The only reason we don't have drivers for some pieces of hardware is the unwillingness of certain manufacturers to cooperate -- they hide behind binaries and refuse to work with the community.
Or they're legally unable to due to licensing conditions.
Make no mistake. The biggest reason hardware vendors are reluctant to work on Linux drivers are because of problems in Linux and the zealotry of certainly parts of the Linux community.