<snipped for brevity>
Epson, by contrast, have made a big effort, and I use their kit with SuSE on a daily basis. Perhaps the best way to begin chipping away at the lack of co-operation from other vendors is to drop them a line politely telling them why you're going to buy Epson (or another co-operative manufacturer) rather than their product. I suppose a quick line to Epson to tell them you bought their kit *because* of Linux support is indicated too.
Indeed that does help, but if they are one of the larger, more "negative" companies, writing an actual letter may carry more weight. I do not know what hardware companies have to lose in having Open Source drivers, or at least support for Linux.
Frustrating situation though. Cheers Fergus
Ya, the other thing to consider is that usually corporations change at a snails pace. Considering that Linux is reaching critical mass and the adoption of Linux is beginning to snowball, one might realistically summize that the suits my only catch on to this months down the line.
It costs money whichever way they look at it and they want to make sure they get some return on their investment. This is especially true for current "desktop" hardware such as scanners or digital camera's.
And also, they often have the mentality to steer clients to their newer products and therefore they believe that people may feel no choice but to "upgrade" to a newer product. This is what the company wants because it means new revenue - naturally.
ATI took an awfully long time to include more cards with their drivers...
However, a lot of people don't have the spare cash to throw down everytime they drop a former product. My wife is having the same problem with Mac OSX. The HP 4770c scanner worked/had drivers in Mac OS 9.x but it is unsupported in OSX. The same happened with printers in XP (though much of the blame is on M$ and it "certified driver" program - bleh).
Mac OSX is basically in the same boat as Linux (not that high percentage of the market, also have moved to a Unix base) right now, apart from Linux does not have a very strong marketing division to assault your TV screens (I have yet to see the recent IBM ad).
What I guess really bothers me is that the chip makers are really the bottom line with this issue. I mean I have read several emails of the various sane devs that state they have sent several emails to companies like Motorola, RealTek, etc... That have gone unanswered repeatedly.
Yes and we have to research a bit before plunging money into a companies product. If they have zero support or tolerance for Linux then I will look for alternatives. If Linux continues to grow and people stop buying these products the manufacturers will eventually see the effect.
So this begs the question - is this a matter of protecting proprietary/trade secrets that are vaible or just a blanket policy not to release any info regardless?
Depends on the company I believe :). Nvidia have stated many times that they cannot release a fully Open Source driver because of trade secrets, some of which do not belong to them. Some companies I ma sure just do not want to bother right now...
Cheers, Curtis. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux)
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