Many is the time that I've found a spiffy new piece of hardware that I
would truly love to use on my trusty linux box. But, the box only
says it works under Windows and Mac and "Unix" (which?). Or the
salesdroid goes crosseyed when I mention Linux.
"No problem", say I. "I'll just write my own driver for it." But when
I contact the manufacturer, I find them bafflingly tight-lipped about
their specs.
Well, this UDI crap helps us two ways:
1) it forces manufacturers to be public about their interfaces if they
expect to work under any UNIX, and
2) it means when I go shopping for hardware, I just have to look for
junk that says it supports "x86 UNIX".
We in the Linux crowd have been writing drivers for everyone for
years, so this doesn't make any more work for us. Except that we'll
have to rewrite our device driver interface or add a separate,
parallel one (yuck).
My only question is: ok, UDI makes people release their drivers as
freeware, but does it make people release _source_? I still proudly
am running no software on most of my machines that I haven't compiled
myself. I'd like to keep it that way.
Only one of my machines is tainted by software I haven't compiled: my
Win95/games laptop.
--
Jon Paul Nollmann ne' Darren Senn sinster@balltech.net
Unsolicited commercial email will be archived at $1/byte/day.
Fleez whorshatz poon int horkumn? Cremnant irideize mee-flut.
Lord Arnold Pintle, 1st Legion of Luxembourg, 783AD
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