Re: Announce: ndiswrapper

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Thu Nov 20 2003 - 00:00:53 EST




William Lee Irwin III wrote:

William Lee Irwin III wrote:

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.


On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 03:16:46PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

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.


I'm not convinced it is good for end users. They _think_ they're
getting something that's supported by Linux, but are instead getting
something highly problematic that ties them to specific kernel
versions and cuts off most, if not all, avenues of support available.


Well what they get is hardware accelerated 3d graphics under Linux.
If they didn't need 3d, they can use the open source drivers.
If someone downloads and installs the drivers themselves, they should
know enough to contact nvidia for support (I think nvidia have been
pretty good). Others will contact their ditro support.

There might be a problem where they percieve that Linux is unstable
while it is actually binary drivers.


It's very much a second-class flavor of open source. They dare not
change the kernel version lest the binary-only trainwreck explode.
They dare not run with the whiz-bang patches going around they're
interested in lest the binary-only trainwreck explode. It may oops
in mainline, and all they can do is wait for a tech support line to
answer. Well, they're a little better than that, they have hackers
out and about, but you're still stuck waiting for a specific small
set of individuals and lose all of the "many eyes" advantages.



I must say that I've been using the same nvidia drivers on my desktop
system for maybe a year, and never had a crash including going through
countless versions of 2.5/6. True you need to recompile the intermediate
layer, but then, nobody who knows less than me will know or care about
kernel versions. Their distro will upgrade kernel+drivers if needed, and
presumably the distro has done some sort of testing / QA.


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