RE: [future of drivers?] a proposal for binary drivers.

David Schwartz
2006-03-14T00:00:24Z

> The consequence would be that $COMPANY writes a driver and blames the
> rest of the Linux world to change some internal undocumented interface
> months lateron just that they can commercially state to "support Linux"
> but without any real reason. In the non-evolutionary Windows world this
> holds until the next major release, but not on the high-tech front.

It should be possible to define a reasonable set of requirements that one
must meet in order to claim to "support Linux", just as Microsoft does for
Windows. One requirement should definitely be that driver source code be
available to everyone who purchases the hardware and that all (or at least
sufficient) interfaces to the hardware be well-documented.

DS