Re: Idea: Automatic binary driver compiling system

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Wow, kudos to your work with the consequences of binary drivers. I certainly do not wish to add any redundant remarks of trolling sentences to this discussion. I've read +50 posts about binary drivers on this mailing list and in conclusion to that, I'd like to only add the following:

My idea was not to compromise the structure of the kernel. Nothing should be changed here. I also see a very notable resistance to binary drivers from distributions. Looking at the way ATI and NVidia drivers are treated by Fedora, SUSE and Ubuntu, I actually think they too have an agenda on this matter, and somehow it resembles their agenda on av-codecs. It's a sneaky-sneaky thing - if the user doesn't know a binary driver exists, we won't tell him. FC5 recently released made this huge "oops... we banned non-GPL modules in the kernel".

Anyways, I'm very happy with the combination of intelligence and idealism on this list, and suddenly I feel more attracted to writing a driver instead. For my Rio Karma mp3 player. It's a USB thing.. should be do-able in 3 months even though I've never written a driver.


Cheers everybody, and thanks for sharing! =)

/ Benjamin


Arjan van de Ven wrote:
On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 16:53 +0100, Benjamin Bach wrote:
Arjan van de Ven wrote:
there are over a thousand open source drivers, and at most a handful
binary ones. Please go do your math.
You're doing the wrong comparison. How many drivers are missing

not too many. This is largely because hardware interfaces are getting
increasingly standardized (it's cheaper for the hw vendors to not have
to create a new driver for Windows XP)

 or
lacking in ability?

some. But the vast majority is "good enough" by any standard.

 And if you add to your handful of binary drivers
those thousands that exist for xp...

then it's clear that linux is better off ;)
(and yes while XP has more drivers, in linux a driver would generally
drive the hardware that in the windows world uses 10 to 20  drivers)

well, numbers do change. Also, most open source drivers aren't made by
the vendors themselves.

and? For standard interfaces... no big deal.
And for non-standard interfaces.. it's increasingly done with the vendor
help

We're doing subjective math here. It doesn't change the fact that Linux
would be better off with improved hardware support, right?

yes. But "more binary drivers" is absolutely not "better off"; but
that's going towards the usual bimonthly troll topic so lets not go
there and stop here.


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