Dear Fedora Community, what do you want?

[Z]

Actually the situation is a lot better on the audio drivers. It used to
be pure hell. I had 2 dead cards due to company death (using the vortex
chip). I think that there's some alsa support now, but the MIDI part is
dead and gone.

The nVidia situation is a little more disturbing. From what I gather
from Alan Cox they have some trade secret that they just can't release
openly. Either they simply don't own the algorithms/code on the card
engine, or they are playing some dirty trick. I give them the benefit of
the doubt, so I'm assuming that they just can't release the full specs.
This happens quite a lot, actually. The clueless complain a lot about
the "viral" GPL and conveniently forget that IP-style licenses are even
more infectious.

On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 09:58, Andy Green wrote:

> > I know nothing is for certain (besides: death and taxes  :) but I would
> > like to write the email just to get the issue out there. so I'm asking
> > What do we want from manufactures? Just great stable drivers? GPL
> > drivers? And How can we convince them that writing drivers for Linux is
> > worth their time?
> 
> They don't have to write the drivers for Linux: if you look on sf people have 
> done amazing work reverse-engineering protocols and making their own drivers.
> 
> What they should do is
> 
>  - document their hardware registers/protocols openly, and / or 
> 
>  - provide code for core driver functionality in a way that is OS independent, 
> not sample code but the actual core code from the Windows driver
> 
> Then coders can come to the device hugely empowered to make a really superior 
> driver, not from backbreaking puzzling out functionality but from real docs 
> or real code.