Linked by Ben Mazer on Mon 26th Jan 2004 19:52 UTC
Lately, there has been a "Why linux isn't ready for the desktop" article every 3 days. Most of the time, these articles originate from a lack of understanding or acceptance of the open source system. I'd like to try to address some of the common arguments against linux here, and try to help people understand why linux probably won't be on your desktop for a while.
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"Why would you want to 'convert' people?"
The more people we can get to use linux, the more commerical software(apps,games,DRIVERS!!!,etc) we can expect.
No. What you will get is that companies will start creating buggy, closed source drivers. And those are completely worthless. A driver should have a license that offers as much freedom as the rest of the kernel, or more. So ideally, manufacturer released drivers should be BSD licensed, or public domain, as that allows integration in all operating systems (closed-source, GPL-licensed and BSD-licensed)
But we can't expect them to write drivers for every possible OS out there. So hardware companies should provide the necessary documentation to write a driver under a completely free license, which has no restrictions whatsoever (so no NDA's, no long disclaimers, just free)
But as the majority of people couldn't possibly care less about this, this won't ever happen. But a few manufacturers will provide documentation, and so I'll just buy their stuff. And I don't care if it costs me more. I don't even care if their products don't perform as good as the others.