Actually the situation is a lot better on the audio drivers. It used to be pure hell. I had 2 dead cards due to company death (using the vortex chip). I think that there's some alsa support now, but the MIDI part is dead and gone. The nVidia situation is a little more disturbing. From what I gather from Alan Cox they have some trade secret that they just can't release openly. Either they simply don't own the algorithms/code on the card engine, or they are playing some dirty trick. I give them the benefit of the doubt, so I'm assuming that they just can't release the full specs. This happens quite a lot, actually. The clueless complain a lot about the "viral" GPL and conveniently forget that IP-style licenses are even more infectious. On Thu, 2004-06-03 at 09:58, Andy Green wrote: > > I know nothing is for certain (besides: death and taxes :) but I would > > like to write the email just to get the issue out there. so I'm asking > > What do we want from manufactures? Just great stable drivers? GPL > > drivers? And How can we convince them that writing drivers for Linux is > > worth their time? > > They don't have to write the drivers for Linux: if you look on sf people have > done amazing work reverse-engineering protocols and making their own drivers. > > What they should do is > > - document their hardware registers/protocols openly, and / or > > - provide code for core driver functionality in a way that is OS independent, > not sample code but the actual core code from the Windows driver > > Then coders can come to the device hugely empowered to make a really superior > driver, not from backbreaking puzzling out functionality but from real docs > or real code.
