Message-ID: <440F4C80.6070907@cubic.ch>
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2006 22:28:32 +0100
From: Tim Tassonis <timtas@cubic.ch>
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Subject: Re: [future of drivers?] a proposal for binary drivers.
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 >
 > if there was binary allowed (with any license) maybe dlink themself
 > would build a driver, make documentation and provide it on CD, just
 > see how much effort would be saved and in end he would get more time
 > to treat his patients.
 >

Apart from all the other good arguments already posted:

Are you really sure they will? Maybe dlink will, but I can tell from 
personal expierience (whine, whine) that the majority of vendors still 
won't release drivers. For the simple reason because they regard Linux a 
market too small to support. That is the main reason for most of them, 
not the license stuff.

Before Linux, I was an OS/2 user and although every vendor in the world 
was allowed to provide OS/2 drivers, there were more or less the same 
amount of vendor contributed drivers as there are now in Linux.

I'm 100% sure that Linux supports more hardware than OS/2 did back then 
and the user base (Desktop wise) was at least as big as Linux.

OS/2 died exactly because software companies didn't write closed-source 
software, hardware companies didn't write closed-source drivers, and IBM 
couldn't write it all themselves.

So why repeat this desaster?
Tim


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