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SubjectRe: Linux, UDI and SCO.
Date
> Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> >
> > He found on a manufacturer page, no money - for a download, "NT driver"
> > for his particular piece of a hardware.
..........................................
> > Ooops! No chance even to try to boot anymore.

I posted a real life story about a hapless NT Alpha user who installed
in a good faith a manufacturer provided binary-only driver for what he
resonably thought was his system and destroyed it. From some responses
I got in my email it looks like that I should have dotted all i's
and crossed all t's. I thought that it was clear what I aimed at but
apparently this was not always the case.

With a proliferation of binary-only UDI drivers for Linux, and growing
portion of "just users" who do not know better, there is an extremely
good chance that that story will become a "Linux story". I am also quite
confident that such cases will be reported by trade rags as examples of
"Unix/Linux is for propeller-heads only user-unfriendly immature system
with a bad interface". A lack of competence of a driver packager will
be not mentioned at all.

And one more thing to clarify. I do not have ideological reasons to
be dead-against UDI drivers. But if we will jump into this situation
headlong, without weighting all consequences and raising safeguards,
we will be badly burned. All those who say "So what? We can write
our own drivers anyway." I ask - from what specs if there will be no
incentive to release them? If you are so confident then go ahead and
write a device driver for at least one winmodem.

Michal

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