Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 5th Nov 2009 21:05 UTC
There's no right way to do it, only ideas that are better than others in certain situations. But if you had the opportunity to head up the design of a new OS, one to Put Things Right, one that could be radical enough to varnish out those UI/X bumps that have clung on for years, but practical enough to be used every day, what would you design? How would you handle application management? What about file types and compatibility? Where would you cherry pick the best bits from other OSes and where would you throw away tradition? I've tackled this challenge for myself and present (an unfinished idea): KrocOS (warning: HTML5 site, will display without CSS in IE/older browsers). OSnews Asks: What would make your perfect OS?
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Member since:
2005-11-02
No. Vendors generally do not provide their specs for download. You can download drivers for Windows, or spec sheets, but not specs. Not the information you'd need to write a driver.
This is the heart of the matter, which I addressed in my original post. You may not care about free drivers, and I know the people wanting a stable driver API don't, but I do and the kernel developers sure do. This is entirely about free drivers.
If you want to be honest and rephrase your position as "I believe Linux should have mostly binary-only proprietary drivers and we need a stable API to allow that to happen," then that's fine, but you will see little support from the free software community. Linux exists largely because of people who care about Free software with a capital F.
Have you ever actually used Linux? There's the OS vendor, which is Linus and cohorts, the hardware vendors, and the Linux distributions, who, in order to provide a system that actually can install, have to ship drivers with the install CD. If the drivers are Free this is no problem but if the drivers are non-Free they would require an agreement with the driver author--namely the hardware vendors. This causes many problems, not the least of which is that it prohibits Joe-Random-Me from rolling a distribution.
Nobody cares where you download your drivers from. As I said in my original post, having a better process for installing and loading out of kernel drivers is what Linux really needs. What is a problem is when those drivers are proprietary.
In your optimistic opinion, sure. In my pessimistic opinion, no. I am certain that even if *some* companies do allow redistribution not all will (they will not be required to, so they wont) and that means unsupported hardware at install time. Like, you know, your network card. Can't get the vendor's site now!
I never said that people would stop working on the kernel altogether, although eventually it could happen. I am talking about a disincentive to write replacement Free drivers for proprietary drivers that already exist. If you think this doesn't happen you have only to look at existing Linux driver history to prove otherwise. Only the strong pressure to get drivers in-kernel has been enough to incentivise the creation of replacements thus far.
What? First you say specs don't matter, which is blatantly untrue as without specs Free drivers are fiendishly difficult to write. Then you admit that hardware vendors don't care to write good drivers because the market doesn't require it. This seems like a strong argument to not leave it up to them!