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Broadcom Releases Source Code For Drivers
I'm Not There (1956) writes "Broadcom, the world's largest manufacturer of Wi-Fi transceivers, open sources its Linux device drivers. This is a big win for Linux users, as there are a lot of users that face Wi-Fi problems when they use Linux on their laptops. With these device drivers now open source, distributions can ship them out-of-the-box, and that means no Linux Wi-Fi problems for new devices and upcoming distributions at all."
Looking forward to much broader DD-WRT support for Broadcom hardware in the near future
Just do a quick search for rt2x00 bugs, they've been open sourced a long time, and still has plenty of bugs and failures. It's not magic, it wont' make all problems go away. Yet, that's what the claim is.
-- Linux user #369862
That's probably a couple of years behind, actually.
-- Linux user #369862
Well to be fair most open source "just works".
It's whether it "just works" well that's the big question.-
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
If I had mod points I would have gladded modded you up, though only for your first point. I feel the rest are either washes (you mention bad potential problems without mentioning the potential good ones) or things that are borderline illegal (or should be).
1. Great point, can't argue this one.
2. Is the spirit of fraud, if commonplace and within the letter of the law, and should not be tolerated.
3. Support, if your source is good enough, other people (the community) will actually do your support for you in many cases.
4. Do I actually need to pick this point apart? While it is correct that many PHB believe it, it isn't actually true.
5. There are plenty of business cases to be made for doing so. Free (unpaid by you at any rate) coders improving your device, and depending on license, being required to make those improvements available to you for starters.
1. Licensing. Our drivers include licensed code from at least two other companies - code that implements algorithms seen as proprietary and valuable by those companies.
Release the rest, and provide descriptions of the missing algorithms. They'll be reimplemented in a week.
if their drivers were closed, we would not have the equivalent opportunity to prove that their liars were worse than our liars.
So don't lie.
3. Support. If we publish source, we will end up fielding all kinds of questions from all kinds of people about all kinds of aspects of our product.
Really? Do you think end users are really going to contact Broadcom? Or are they just going to go to the Ubuntu forums like they have been.
4. Security.
We all know that's bullshit.
5. Financial. There is no business case to be made to disclose this proprietary information.
But there is. Before today, if I wanted a wifi router I would only buy one with Atheros chips. Now I will seriously consider a Broadcom based product. I had never run ATI cards before they open sourced their drivers in 2007. Now I have an ATI card.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
hmm .. I still have to see a driver for any wireless card that crashes linux. Worst case scenario, it just doesn't work, which was incidentally the problem I had with my broadcom adapter on an Acer Aspire One D250. but crash the OS? not really, no.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Wireless, for the most part, works very well under Linux. If you were unable to get the linux version to work you could always use the windows version via ndiswrapper.
In the past year alone I have seen a significantly reduced instance of wireless driver issues as the open source community has worked out so many of the problems. Though, you had to install them after you installed the distribution--you were told there were proprietary hardware drivers available (automatically). You needed only a couple clicks and a reboot to make them work.
This provides a way to have wireless work without the need to be prompted for proprietary drivers and the reboot.
If there was a reason to complain, and there was about 2 year ago, wireless is where it was at. Linux didn't bring joy all the time, especially in certain HP laptops. Even so, it seems every week I have to deal with issues with a customer's wireless device under Windows XP, Vista, or Win7 (though not as often under Win7). It isn't a joy to work with them under Windows either.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
>Does this help?
If you would, please do one more thing: name the company, so I can make a point of avoiding its products.
1) True. The right thing to do is to go open source from day one.
2) Being verifiably honest is a competitive advantage.
3) Perhaps, but a little bit of support time is a small price to pay for free development. It's not going to cost you more than it would have to hire someone to write it. And concerning the 2nd part of your answer, do you have an example of that happening?
4) I think the OP was asking for good reasons, otherwise we could have answered him simply with "Because PHBs are assholes". That is the only real reason.
5) Nobody knows whether or not a given advertisement causes me to buy an item either, but we are still saturated with advertising. An open source driver is another bullet point marketing can use to sway people.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!