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What about vendors?
What about vendors?
Posted Dec 15, 2005 14:21 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)In reply to: What about vendors? by tclark
Parent article: "Just works with Linux"
Margins on consumer hardware are typically so razor thin that the vendors just don't have the means to support Linux. Desktop Linux users make up only a tiny fraction of the potential market yet Linux support tends to be an utter nightmare (what kernel version are you running, what distro, what patches, ...)
Until a noticeable fraction of CompUSA customers are running Linux desktops, hardware vendors aren't on the hook for anything.
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What about vendors?
Posted Dec 15, 2005 15:13 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
That's just it -- If they provide documentation to interested developers, or provide a full open-source driver they *don't* have to provide anything more in the way of support.
Most of the "support nightmare" of Desktop Linux goes away when your driver is provided as full source, and goes away almost entirely if it goes into the kernel -- they only need to actually support the developers who are responsible for maintaining the driver.
And it's alwo worth mentioning that those selling "consumer hardware" with "razor thin" margins aren't actually developing their own drivers for Windows either; by and large they're handed to them from their ODMs or the chipset manufacturers. The latter is especially true of wireless cards. The OEMs would love to hand out Linux drivers, but they don't have anything to give to their customers because their upstream provider won't supply it, or let them.
What about vendors?
Posted Dec 15, 2005 17:32 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
I don't want them to support "Linux". I want each vendor to support at least one target Linux distribution (be it a custom one), that should be free enough.
Specifically: no binary drivers allowed. Not even through wrappers such as ndiswrappers.
If the product works well with ReferenceLinux, chance are other linux packagers will be able to adapt it to their distro. And if not: the community will.