Dear Fedora Community, what do you want?

[dhollis at davehollis.com]

Quoting Nicolas Mailhot <Nicolas.Mailhot at laPoste.net>:

>
> As far as I'm concerned, closed drivers (as good as they might be) means
> future deadware, and me spending precious time trying to rescue it.
> Closed drivers have no value - or even a *negative* one, since their
> existence means the manufacturer won't spend time on free ones. They are
> a fool's trap - even if you don't pay the associated cost at first you
> *will* pay it sometime. As all the nvidia FC2 users are now discovering.
>
>
I agree.  Closed drivers really don't help anybody.  In some cases, I almost
worry about the manufacturer developing the driver because experience in the
Windows world shows that everybody loves to make a driver and then throw some
proprietary interface on top of it for controlling/configuring it and you wind
up with 50 different little apps on bootup that you never use but each take up
about 8mb of RAM.

If the vendor does produce the driver, they should really try and be active in
the subsystem where the driver belongs (SCSI, USB, Video, whatever) so that the
gurus in those areas can do some peer review and help work out issues and
"that's gonna bite you in the ass" kind of things.

When I wrote the driver for the ASIX USB2 Ethernet chip, I was able to get a lot
of great advice from the USB guys that helped me make the driver really operate
quite well.  If it was a closed source driver, it would have functioned, but
caused all kinds of quirky little issues in various situations that would never
have been able to be tracked down.

In short, the manufacturers should either get the specs to the appropriate folks
so they can write the driver, or do it in house but really try to work with the
community to ensure that the driver interfaces properly.  Additionally, try and
get the driver included mainline if possible.  It really makes it a lot easier
on the end user when it's just in there.



----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.