Major PC Vendors Push For Open Source Drivers

hweimer writes "Remember the heat the Linux Foundation took for allegedly not giving enough attention to Desktop Linux? The latest events at the Foundation's annual summit paint a different picture. Industry heavyweights like Dell, HP, and Lenovo 'announced on stage that they will now include wording in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the delivery of open source drivers.' The move specifically targets desktop and mobile products."

Comments

So...

[Uncle Focker]

What will these same vendors do if these strong encouragements just get ignored? Will they actually apply some economic pressure as some force for these hardware vendors to relent? Otherwise this just seems like nothing but sword rattling. I applaud the effort though and hope it has some effect.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Vendor A sees the encouragement from Dell and does nothing.

Vendor B sees the encouragement, makes open source drivers and advertises to Dell

Dell switches to Vendor B.

I see vendors who are trying to become component suppliers for Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc, to take these encouragements as meaning "If you can do this, we have a reason for choosing your product over "Generic PC part manufacturer 38321"".

Sure the big names may not budge (nVidia, Creative, etc) but hey how many PC's are shipped w/ brand name parts?

Re:What do hardware manufactures...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I always wondered why device drivers are not open source. As they make their money on the hardware they're not losing anything by giving the driver piece to the open source community to enhance.

Reasons include: they don't like providing anything they do for free because a competitor might use it, they don't want to expose their embarrassingly poorly written code, they're afraid their poorly written code will expose their security flaws, they don't want consumers to know about the hacks they use to work around hardware flaws or which compromise quality for speed.

How about pushing for open specs instead?

[vivin]

By Open Source, they unfortunately mean only "Linux". I use FreeBSD. I have Marvell chipset on my Dell that FreeBSD doesn't recognize. Marvell's own FreeBSD driver doesn't recognize it either. Instead of having just Open Source drivers, how about they open up the specs for their hardware? No one is asking them to give us their trade secrets they so jealously guard. Just enough information to let the open source folks write a decent driver instead of painstakingly reverse-engineering Windows drivers, or inspecting the hardware. Linux gets a lot of attention, but there are other open OSes out there that would also benefit. I'm not jealous or anything. I use Linux from time to time, but I just happen to fancy BSD more. I think opening up the specs would actually benefit open source instead of just creating "open source" (Linux) drivers. I guess one could examine the Linux drivers to figure out what they're doing and then port it over to [insert your flavour of OS here]. But if you have the open specs, you don't have to do that extra step.