Ross Vandegrift wrote:
On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 01:50:08PM +0000, Cesare Marilungo wrote:
Again,
I know. But I was talkting about drivers. Other examples?
Lots more than you might think. While many manufacturers are very
closed about implementing their drivers, there's also a bunch that
contribute to the development and support of freely licensed drivers.
Start reading the linux-kernel and xorg mailing lists. You see plenty
of people with Intel, AMD, Adaptec, Promise, among others. Read
through the source and you'll also see code that was originally
submitted by the manufacturer, but licensed freely enough that the
community can sucessfully maintain it. 3Ware is one such example.
As far as audio hardware, Creative Labs used to be a good
player - they contributed the original emu10k1 driver. They're not so
cool now; the top news item on opensource.creative.com is about
releasing proprietary drivers...
Yes, I knew about most of this examples. I'm not too much into these
stuff, so maybe I was wrong.
But my impression is that there's still much to do.
AFAIK, the hardware of a device is becoming less important than before.
Most devices use the same chips programmed to do different things or the
same thing in a different way. So the software side will be more
important in the future, as an investment. With DRMs and such, things
will be even worse, IMO.
Take the iPod, for instance. I can install another firmware (which is no
more just a firmware) on it (like rockbox or ipodlinux). How can Apple
be interested in this? Or in letting me use whatever software I want to
exchange tracks with the device. The iPod is more its software than its
hardware. Am I wrong?
Anyway,
I commented this news just to say that we shouldn't be surprised if a
software that comes from a big manufacturer to support some new
technology is not open source. ;-)
Cheers,
c.
--
http://www.cesaremarilungo.com
