Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Linux, UDI and SCO. | Date | Fri, 18 Sep 1998 18:32:57 +0800 | From | David Luyer <> |
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This is all based on my reading of the previous e-mail, which I believe was a more reading careful than that of the person I'm responding to here. I believe UDI does have the potential to cause problems (especially see my last paragraph) but I think this person has mis-understood the posting. At least I hope they have.
> Hmm, let me see... > They want our drivers, to "establish growth for the UNIX community" (i.e. > for CSO, Solaris, etc).
I have never seen anywhere where they say they want our drivers. They want us to be able to use drivers written for a standard interface, which would not preclude us from using native drivers.
> What's in for us? More work?
No. The message stated SCO were offering to help us develop the ability to use UDI drivers. Maybe a bit of work to make sure UDI drivers work well, but less work to support obscure hardware which nobody really wants to write a native driver for since it is little-used.
> by the average Linux user. Or is there a major hole in the Linux driver > availability > chart I missed?
The major hole is the time to develop new drivers. As well as some other items (eg: PCMCIA notebook floppy drives, future USB devices, ...).
> Will this initiative really make hardware vendors think twice, and force > them to release > hardware specs and driver sources which they withheld before, just because > the Linux > community is cheaper in writing drivers for them?
The idea is that the vendor writes a UDI driver. This is the official driver. If the UDI driver is too slow, the Linux community may write a native driver or an improved UDI driver.
> Having an UDI is a nice idea. But they (the commercials) should work our > way, and not > make us work their way. They want something from us, and have next to > nothing in return.
They want to help us code something, or code it for us. They offer us some hope for drivers released at the same time as new hardware in return. This sounds mostly good to me. The main negative is that UDI may cause some places to not release hardware specs, since we can use the UDI driver, and the "I can't use it on Linux" argument wouldn't hold anymore. Then we may be stuck with potentially slow, inefficient drivers. And of course the threat of a proliferation of binary-only drivers, which is bad in the whole GPL ideology and bad in that it's unknown code, possibly buggy, no chance to review it, etc.
David.
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