OT: Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption
Guy Fraser
guy at incentre.net
Tue Feb 14 16:49:11 UTC 2006
On Tue, 2006-14-02 at 10:47 +1030, Tim wrote:
...snip...
> That's not Microsoft porting to things, that's things being designed to
> work with Windows. The opposite direction. That's done by
> manufacturers paying through the nose for the details from Microsoft
> about how to be compatible with it.
>
> Nvidia, ESS, S3, et al, don't have to buy documents to find out how to
> make their hardware work on Linux, but they don't. They'd like, if they
Just for clarity, are you saying NVidia does not provide drivers for
Linux?
They most certainly do, and they are good drivers. They may have a
binary component which is not open source, but that is not relevant
to this topic.
> cared, for other OS system developers to pay for details for their
> products, but no free system's going to be in a position to do that.
>
> Windows-compatible product development: Hardware manufacturer pays for
> Windows information from Microsoft.
>
> Linux-compatible product development: Expects someone else to buy
> information from them, or sort it out by themselves, but doesn't want
> outsiders knowing how their devices work.
Then buy from one of their competitors, who does co-operate and or
contributes to the development of drivers for their products.
Most Linux Users are using products that do work, and often are
better products, than competing products that are not supported.
It doesn't make too much sense for an "el cheapo" manufacturer to
provide support for Linux, when they have little chance of
recovering there development costs. On the other hand good
Manufacturers such as 3Ware and NVidia do help, and can sell
enough to make it worth while.
If there is enough demand some manufacturers will play nice, I
have heard rumours ATI came around, but I still haven't seen
theme provide decent official support. Their video capture
hardware is better, than most on Windows, but for Linux they
say to use Gatos but it won't compile on Red Hat Kernels.
>
...snip...
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