Non-free Extras?

[Rudolf Kastl]

2006/2/23, Arjan van de Ven <arjan at fenrus.demon.nl>:
>
> >
> > With all the myriad hardware out there the open source community
> > cannot possibly develop drivers for everything.
>
> 5 years ago, I would have maybe believed this.
> Today, no.
> First, the open source community has gotten a lot bigger
> but second, and more important:
> Hardware is standardizing more and more (on the OS<->hardware interface
> level). Look at i810 audio for example. USB is a good other example.
> AHCI sata as well.
>
> These are not accidents! They are for cost saving reasons: if you're
> supported by a driver already shipping in windows XP, you as hardware
> vendor don't need to do a lot of work -> saves costs, and more, time to
> market -> profit.
>
> As a side effect of this, linux is increasingly better off.
>
> Sure there are exeptions, esp in the 3D space, but even there they do
> fully new architectures only every 18 months or so, just because it's so
> expensive to do entirely new drivers and then maintain them.
> (even when they are bundled as part of a "unified driver", most of these
> new architectures are de-facto new drivers, just merged into one binary
> file)
>
>
> --
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>

>From personal experience i do agree. simple example:

socket 939 nforce 4x board fc4 vs winxp pro sp2 integrated:

FC4: everything working out of the box no additional drivers needed
besides raid didnt work in the installer. (known problem)
Rawhide: Raid controller works out of the box aswell
WinXP pro SP2: Onboard nic not working at all and downloading of
driver not possible since no working NIC.

regards,
Rudolf Kastl