Re: Announce: ndiswrapper

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

Jean Tourrilhes wrote:
>>	Even better :
>>		1) go to the Wireless LAN Howto
>>		2) find a card are supported under Linux that suit your needs
>>		3) buy this card
>>	I don't see the point of giving our money to vendors that
>> don't care about us when there are vendors making a real effort toward
>> us.

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:26:59PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Unfortunately that leaves users without support for any recent wireless 
> hardware.  It gets more and more difficult to even find Linux-supported 
> wireless at Fry's and other retail locations...

And what good would it be to have an entire driver subsystem populated
by binary-only drivers? That's not part of Linux, that's "welcome to
nvidia hell" for that subsystem too, and not just graphics cards.

I say we should go the precise opposite direction and take a hard line
stance against binary drivers, lest we find there are none left we even
have source to and are bombarded with unfixable bugreports.

No, it's not my call to make, but basically, I don't see many benefits
left. The additional drivers we got out of this were highly version-
dependent, extremely fragile, and have been generating massive numbers
of bugreports nonstop on a daily basis since their inception.

We'd lose a few things, like vmware, but it's not worth the threat of
vendors migrating en masse to NDIS/etc. emulation layers and dropping
all spec publication and source drivers, leaving us entirely at the
mercy of BBB's (Buggy Binary Blobs) to do any io whatsoever.

Seriously, the binary-only business has been doing us a disservice, and
is threatening to do worse.


-- wli