Les Mikesell wrote: >> In my (limited) experience closed drivers create serious problems, >> as you never know if they will work with newer kernels >> or other software, so you cannot rely on them too much. > > In my experience, open source drivers have as many or more problems than > the closed source versions. Well, virtually all the open source drivers I use are maintained by someone who updates them for new versions of Linux and/or Fedora. By contrast, the few closed source drivers I have used usually state something like "Compatible with Linux 2.2.10" and when they don't work with Linux 2.6.10 there is nothing you can do about it. (I came across this recently with a driver from Avaya for an Orinoco WiFi card.) > _If_ you are Alan Cox or some number of > hackers with equivalently specialized skills that you could probably > count on one hand, having the source code available might be of some > value when the supplied binary doesn't work. The rest of us report the > bug and wait, and again in my experience over the last couple of > decades, the closed source providers are at least equally responsive in > this scenario. Really? When did you last get a positive response from a closed source provider?
