Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver

[Michael A. Peters]

On 11/21/2004 04:21:17 PM, Sean Middleditch wrote:
>  Sure, some mythical company releases fully GPLd drivers, or
> usable
> specs, a six months before their hardware is released.  The kernel  
> has
> it in-tree a couple months before the hardware is released.  Six
> months
> after the hardware is released, a distro is released that actually
> *has*
> that kernel.  Several months after that you might be able to expect  
> 5%
> of the non-uber-geek OS consumer base to have a distro using that
> kernel.

My experience differs.
Bought an nforce2 (ayn8x deluxe) board shortly after they were  
released.

RH8 did not support the NVidia nic, the 3com nic, or the sound card.
I had to get them from nvidia.

The sound card (nvidias driver was basically the kernel driver) and the  
3com nic (I think a two line patch to the existing 3com driver) were  
already in the alan cox tree, and were in the next kernel - and in  
every singly linux distribution that shipped after 2.4.21 I think it  
was. Update to RH8 kernel also provided for both.

Bought Windows XP SP1 about 7 months later - were those drivers in  
there? No. I had to install a tulip nic just so I could download the  
drivers - because MS did not change their 3com driver to support the  
onboard 3com nic.

The Linux community was very fast at including drivers for my new  
hardware in the kernel, and in every distribution after it was in the  
kernel - and in distributions released before it was in the kernel  
through kernel updates (often same kernel they shipped, but they  
patched the 3com driver and i810 audio driver for my hardware)