From: Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk>
To: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Subject: Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario
Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 18:44:56 +0000
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Cc: William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>,
       Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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On Monday 05 December 2005 13:07, Pekka Enberg wrote:
> On 12/5/05, William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com> wrote:
> > I expect the closed source IP affairs rather to keep chipping away
> > until Linux is dead, or they get tired and change strategies to kill it,
> > versus any sudden changes of course.
>
> Alternatively, take away ndiswrapper and binary-only ATI and NVIDIA
> drivers, and perhaps the users will start to care and pressure their
> vendor to open up. I know I have become a very disappointed ATI
> customer after figuring out that they have zero interest in me using
> the hardware I paid for on Linux...

The problem with this approach is the tiny size of the minority of customers 
using ATI's video cards on a non-Windows OS.

I think the only way we can persuade vendors to not take the direction that 
Arjan speculates they will, is to increase the Linux userbase (and therefore 
ATI customers using Linux) by making "Desktop Linux" increasingly competent.

As easy as it is to be pessimistic about binary vendor lockin, there's still 
places in industry, government and inevitably the general public where Linux 
is slowly starting to take off as a real desktop alternative to Windows.

When this happens, vendors will just have to solve all the IP nonsense 
associated with their hardware, or design hardware to be more dependent on 
firmware so that largely open source drivers are more feasible for them.

-- 
Cheers,
Alistair.

'No sense being pessimistic, it probably wouldn't work anyway.'
Third year Computer Science undergraduate.
1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK.
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