Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 9th Sep 2010 17:40 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ahem. I just had to write that all-caps headline. Broadcom's wireless chips - used by just about everybody in this industry - have been a major pain in the bum for Linux users, because the company did not release open source drivers. Workarounds had to be created, lots of pain was had in the process, but now, Broadcom has finally seen the light: they have open sourced their wireless Linux drivers.
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Member since:
2010-07-16
This sounds good in theory, but doesn't always work in practice. For example the current issues with Intel i8xx graphics chips.
If you don't know about that, the gist is that those chips don't work well with the new architecture (KMS/GEM/DRI2). And there's simply not enough manpower to get those chips working, as they're very tricky beasts. The solution Intel came up with is introducing ShadowFB support into KMS. That way you at least get modesetting on those chips, but shadowfb means no 2D or 3D acceleration whatsoever.
Bottom line, even in open source, hardware will lose support after a while.