What about vendors?

What about vendors?

Posted Dec 15, 2005 15:13 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: What about vendors? by bronson
Parent article: "Just works with Linux"

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.

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