On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:55:22 -0400, gregjohn wrote:

> Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>> Damn that Linux with its 3% market share...
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/microsoft-teaches-best-
buy-employees-how-to-troll-linux-users.ars
>>
>>
> 
> I bet Windows7 will never drop support for video or wifi drivers with an
> upgrade for ideological (RMS) reasons.

There's a practical reason as well.  If it's not OSS, the interaction is 
something that's not known, and often times when a vendor releases a 
Linux driver as closed-source they don't properly support it - they treat 
it as if they're "throwing Linux a bone".  I've run into that with video 
drivers for an older IBM Thinkpad (back when it wasn't older).  ATI 
provided the drivers, but when I reported a problem to them, they told me 
to talk to IBM.  Duh, it's ATI's driver, and I wanted to let THEM know of 
a problem in the driver I downloaded from THEIR website.

But they wouldn't talk to me.

Now if the driver had been OSS, I could've had someone in the OSS 
community look at it.

Jim

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