On 02/07/2014 01:54 PM, CS DBA issued this missive:
Hi All; It seems to me that the "marriage" that Microsoft & Apple enjoy per hardware designed for their software gives them a huge advantage. I see that the Linux community is quite good at coming up with drivers, software, etc for hardware after the fact.
It's a bit more the other way around. The hardware is designed first, then they share the specs with the software vendors. It's logical in the sense that they'd have a better shot at getting some money out of M$ or Apple than the open-source community. One example of this was with the old TI wireless chips...you _could_ poke a register in the hardware that could cause the chip to transmit at a higher level than the FCC would allow. Obviously, that's sort of illegal so they kept the interface of that chip under tight lock and key and only told Microsoft about it. For several years the only driver that would work was Microsoft's. The chip was discontinued after a couple of years. This continues with the firmware required for certain wireless chips and such...it's only available from M$ or Apple and we've had to create a program that rips the code out of the M$/Apple files and puts it in a format our OS can use.
I wonder, what could be accomplished if a Linux based distro had the same advantage? I'm in the early stages of researching just such a company.
It's been tried before and didn't work (Linuxware, Linux Hardware, Inc. to name two). The economics of the OSS way of thinking and commercial endeavors don't necessarily mesh well.
We'll be setting up some infrastructure around community involvement and feedback, however I'd be interested in any initial feedback you all have. I'm thinking that the OS would remain fully open source (GPL) and we'd license the hardware specs in the same way. Then we could release laptops & desktops that truly have an advantage. The company would couple a solid Linux distro with it's own tweaks (polish & branding & such) coupled with our own hardware. I suspect that instead of waiting for the current HW vendors to release new hardware and then quickly figure out how to interface with it we can put effort into polish and functionality and quickly become the trend setters for MS and Apple to follow.
In many cases, if the HW vendors would just release the damned specs to the OSS community, we wouldn't have to reverse-engineer so much stuff. As it stands now, we have to get some other OS that does talk to it, then instrument that and plow through the findings to figure out how to talk to the hardware. Open specs would allow the OSS groups to get started right away without all that rigmarole. There are some vendors (such as nVidia and Intel) that do pretty actively support OSS. I wish the others would. Most peripheral HW vendors (but by no means all) hamstring OSS by only sharing their docs with the "big boys". Part of that is that they aren't likely to realize an immediate return on their investment, but a large part of it is they don't want to have to support fourteen-gazillion derivative operating systems. I've been there and logistically it's a bloody nightmare. I applaud your efforts and hope you'll have better luck than we've seen in the past in such endeavors. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 22643734 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - Millihelen (n): The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
