Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 20 Nov 2003 15:16:46 +1100 | From | Nick Piggin <> | Subject | Re: Announce: ndiswrapper |
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William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>Jean Tourrilhes wrote: > >>> Even better : >>> 1) go to the Wireless LAN Howto >>> 2) find a card are supported under Linux that suit your needs >>> 3) buy this card >>> I don't see the point of giving our money to vendors that >>>don't care about us when there are vendors making a real effort toward >>>us. >>> > >On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:26:59PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > >>Unfortunately that leaves users without support for any recent wireless >>hardware. It gets more and more difficult to even find Linux-supported >>wireless at Fry's and other retail locations... >> > >And what good would it be to have an entire driver subsystem populated >by binary-only drivers? That's not part of Linux, that's "welcome to >nvidia hell" for that subsystem too, and not just graphics cards. > >I say we should go the precise opposite direction and take a hard line >stance against binary drivers, lest we find there are none left we even >have source to and are bombarded with unfixable bugreports. > >No, it's not my call to make, but basically, I don't see many benefits >left. The additional drivers we got out of this were highly version- >dependent, extremely fragile, and have been generating massive numbers >of bugreports nonstop on a daily basis since their inception. > >We'd lose a few things, like vmware, but it's not worth the threat of >vendors migrating en masse to NDIS/etc. emulation layers and dropping >all spec publication and source drivers, leaving us entirely at the >mercy of BBB's (Buggy Binary Blobs) to do any io whatsoever. > >Seriously, the binary-only business has been doing us a disservice, and >is threatening to do worse. >
You have to admit its good for end users though. And indirectly, what is good for them is good for us. Take the nvidia example: end users get either a binary driver or nothing. If we were somehow able to stop nvidia from distributing their binary driver, they would say "OK".
I don't advocate making it easy to do non native drivers of course.
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