On 2/7/14, 3:27 PM, Rick Stevens wrote:
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.
Thanks, I think part of the issue is timing. I hope the timing is right,
we're seeing a LOT of HW that caters to what the vendors want at the
expense of what the end users are asking for.... That's my theory.
I'll keep you posted
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- 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. -
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