What about the Linux compatible hardware market ? [LWN.net]

What about the Linux compatible hardware market ?

Posted Dec 6, 2005 17:09 UTC (Tue) by copsewood (subscriber, #199)
Parent article: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Surely there are now enough people using Linux in the world to create a large enough market to profit those providing Linux compatible hardware ? This article investigates a risk that people will be able to get higher margins through proprietary drivers supporting proprietary features. However, most purchasers are interested in buying hardware which is cost effective, durable and reliable. This applies to the Windows related hardware market as much as Linux. How can hardware be described as reliable across a wide range of applications and in combination with a wide range of other hardware and software unless it is subject to open review and well tested ?

As Linux is relatively strong in the server market compared with the workstation market, we are more likely to see proprietary binary-only protection of hardware features in:

a. The very low cost hardware market - where reliability is traded off against cost. This happened with Winmodems, the cost cutting occuring by moving functionality previously in hardware into software. This doesn't apply to servers, because the cost of Windows licenses prevents Windows servers being low cost compared to Linux servers.

b. Hardware very specific to workstations and little used on servers, e.g. 3D graphics cards.

Having better information available for Linux-related hardware purchases is essential if the potential influence of Linux buyers on the hardware market is to be maximised. In practice I suspect that this influence is greater than the number of PCs and servers actually running Linux would suggest, because very many Windows users are likely to ask Linux users for advice on hardware purchases. E.G. it would be irresponsible for me to recommend a purchase for intended Windows-only use in respect of hardware likely to suffer poor future support and be unreliable (including on Windows) due to the hardware driver interface not being subject to open critical comment and review.

A Windows hardware recommendation is of more value to the Windows user if the latter is not permanently locked in by this recommendation to running a particular version of Windows at a particular service pack level.

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What about the Linux compatible hardware market ?

Posted Dec 7, 2005 7:27 UTC (Wed) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

A few very large purchasers are interested in buying hardware that is *certified* to be cost effective, durable, and reliable. If you have sufficiently deep pockets, you can certify any old crap as long as it has a hope in hell of working--if you were wrong, you have to pay for some warranty replacements or patches for the really severe problems, but otherwise your risk is negligible.

The trouble with certifications is that they are primarily a legal construct, so they come with lawyers who want to approve all changes to everything. Try doing that when the code changes every two minutes, by people against whom you have no recourse, in ways that you don't really control. This is why some people like binary-only drivers: they ultimately minimize all possibility of change other than what is convenient for the vendor, and they consider this to be a *good* thing.

It must be a major pain in the butt to make hardware for Linux people. We want to run our own software on it (even if the vendor writes the original version of that software). We want to optimize the hell out of it. We want to drive hardware X using the device driver architecture of hardware Y. We want to mix and match strategies from a variety of different products so that the best software is talking to whatever hardware we have. We want to have features in our device drivers that nobody else has heard of, and sometimes that nobody else understands. We want to use network cards as serial ports, video cards as communications devices, and hard disks as game controls. We want continuous support for hardware long after it has been purchased. We expect all of this to be included in the cost of the hardware. It would probably be easier for the vendors if they understood that we're also willing to do all of that work ourselves, and we're not waiting to launch a patent lawsuit against them.