Somebody in the thread at some point said: > Andy Green wrote: >> >>> The issue is theoretical at best. In the unlikely event that access to >>> a video card breaks due to undiscovered bugs in the original _and_ >>> vendor refusal to fix it, I'd expect it to be cheaper to either replace >>> Linux or the card than to hire an expert to temporarily revive the >>> now-dead combination. >> >> Well whatever your other complaints, I really don't think you take into >> account the developer suffering that happens from the unsupported >> reverse engineering aspect that is often part of the drivers. > > Not only do I not take it into account, I can't understand why anyone > thinks this is desirable compared to using drivers written and > maintained by the engineers that build the hardware and have the test > equipment to diagnose it. It's desirable when the device you want a driver for otherwise drags in Windows as a "dependency". That puts you into a situation where your choice of video card or whatever is making the decisions about security policy for you, and all the other areas that the choice of OS touches on. >> More than that though I myself have taken advantage of a kernel driver >> blowing a panic to look through the source and fix the problem, and send >> a patch describing and fixing to problem, which was accepted. > > Again, this doesn't sound like a desirable scenario compared to using > something that already works. You never had a closed source driver with a bug in? There's nothing for you to do but make a bug report and wait. -Andy
