Talking to Logitech on the phone regarding webcam support for linux

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 08 February 2007 13:50, David Boles wrote:
>Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> On 08/02/07, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> A better question for most of us might be "who knows more about how
>>> to make it work best, you or the experts that designed it?  And as
>>> far as changing it, wouldn't it be best to keep expenses down to let
>>> hardware providers make changes as frequently as technology permits,
>>> supplying drivers to match instead of waiting for an OS provider that
>>> might be dealing with thousands of other devices to catch up?
>>
>> I would agree with you IF those same hardware providers actually DID
>> get off their asses and write the drivers. But they are not.
>>
>> Dotan Cohen
>
>There have been over one million downloads of Fedora Core 6 and I can
> only think of maybe four people on this list that have mentioned
> webcams.
>
>Do you suppose that since the driver developers get paid by the hardware
>makers to write Windows drivers that they do it for that reason? They do
> it for the money. And since you want free driver support for your free
> OS there just might be very little incentive to pay to have drivers
> written for Linux? For no money. I don't know what they are paying but
> I would think that writing drivers for four people, give or take a few
> more, would not even be be on the 'list of important things to do'.
>
>Think about this that way.
>--
>
>  David

There are lots of us who bought what was supposed to be supported webcams, 
only to find the support was rather horribly broken and that we wasted 
$70 USD or more.  I did exactly that, spent a week putzing with the 
drivers from Xhaard(sp) and never did get A: real time out of it, or B: 
usable colors, it was all yellow and chartreuse.  The author said that 
was correct.  I took it over to the neighbors & plugged in into their 
winders box, loaded the driver from the cd and it worked great although 
at only about 10 fps so motion artifacts were still evident.  I gave it 
to them.  So in this case a linux user DID spend money with the jerks, 
and got zero return for the money spent.  An email was replied to with a 
simple "we don't support linux".

I submit that their attitude vis-a-vis linux support IS sufficiently well 
known that sales of that sort of product to knowledgeable linux users is 
essentially zip.  But they need to ask themselves which came first, their 
refusal to support linux, or the non-existant sales to the millions of 
linux users out there?

To me, the answer is obvious, they have not planted the seed from which 
they might reap.  The choice, it seems to me, is theirs.  Mine is to not 
patronize them for that particular product.  Ditto for that hardware 
whose parent brand name is Memorex, who also have a policy that there 
will be no warranty replacements for any reason whatsoever if linux is 
ever mentioned.  I have been burned about $100 USD on two occasions over 
that, for a scanner, and a cdrom reader back when they were about that 
high priced.

As a group, I'd like to think we are the gearheads, but then I know of 
some winderz folks who have to have the absolute latest toys too, so...

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.