Re: Free Linux Driver Development!

From: Jan Engelhardt
Date: Wed Jan 31 2007 - 13:32:28 EST



On Jan 31 2007 09:58, alan wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> On Jan 30 2007 14:00, Roland Dreier wrote:
>> >
>> > An uncharitable vendor might decide it's not worth publishing specs,
>> > since the Linux guys can reverse engineer the Windows driver just as
>> > fast anyway.
>>
>> And ndiswrapper gives fire to just releasing the Windows one :(
>
> ndiswrapper is a way to make it work "now" as opposed to "correct".
> There is a lot that you cannot do with ndiswrapper that a proper driver
> can.

The fear is that a vendor might not open things because it works
"reasonably enough" (for them as well as the enduser) at "this time".
E.g. I got sis162u.inf for some usb wireless adapter, it works
enough, but of course I am not too happy with the binary blob because
it might have some not-so-"correct" core that could silently oops me
away.



Jan
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