From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S264254AbTKTEAn (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:00:43 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S264258AbTKTEAn (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:00:43 -0500 Received: from holomorphy.com ([199.26.172.102]:61355 "EHLO holomorphy") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S264254AbTKTEAm (ORCPT ); Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:00:42 -0500 Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 20:00:34 -0800 From: William Lee Irwin III To: Jeff Garzik Cc: jt@hpl.hp.com, Linux kernel mailing list , Pontus Fuchs Subject: Re: Announce: ndiswrapper Message-ID: <20031120040034.GF19856@holomorphy.com> Mail-Followup-To: William Lee Irwin III , Jeff Garzik , jt@hpl.hp.com, Linux kernel mailing list , Pontus Fuchs References: <20031120031137.GA8465@bougret.hpl.hp.com> <3FBC3483.4060706@pobox.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3FBC3483.4060706@pobox.com> Organization: The Domain of Holomorphy User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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