ndiswrapper missing?

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 01:31:09PM -0800, Josh wrote:
 > Hello testers,
 >  
 >  After a fresh FC5T3 install, i was configuring my USB wireless network
 >  dongle and couldn't find ndiswrapper on the FC5T3 CD.

it's deliberatly not shipped.

 >  I may have overlooked. Is there a reason not to bundle ndiswrapper with FC5T3?

- it creates a situation where if you get a kernel bug, I'm not even going
  to look at it, because *anything* could have happened, and as the driver
  is effectively binary only, there's nothing I can do about it.

- it reinforces the message to hardware vendors that it's ok to not
  release documentation or native Linux drivers, because 'they can just use
  the windows driver'.  This is not a 'might happen' btw, there are already
  companies saying this when you call them to ask for documentation.

  The fact that other distros are shipping this is really sad.

Given a lot of ex-Windows users fled that platform because they were tired
of crashes, I'm amazed that people now want to run the drivers from it, when
a lot of the time, they were the cause of the problems.

I know it sucks to have hardware that you can't use.  I've got a similar
device myself that doesn't work right now. But there's hope that at
some point the bcm43xx driver will work with it.  Testing, and providing
feedback to developers of *native* drivers is the direction we want
to be headed toward.

		Dave

-- 
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