On Thu, Dec 03, 2009 at 02:07:22AM +0100, Carlos E. R. wrote:
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On Wednesday, 2009-12-02 at 13:41 +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
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IHMO the proper solution would be to fix up those old drivers. But a lot of people who know how to do this don't have the hardware any more.
If the free software community was working the way it's always been painted this would not be a problem at all: those people who still have and use this harware would just do this themselves... oh, well.
There is something wrong there.
The users of a piece of hardware may have no idea how to fix a driver, they may be just users. People that know how to do that, devs, are probably tech lovers that love current, powerful hardware... so users are left stranded.
Told other way, it is wrong to assume that any user can maintain software by themselves.
I don't expect every user to fix his drivers. But at the end of the day somebody needs to do this. So here is a list of groups that would qualify: a. the hardware vendor b. the Linux distributor c. some free software enthusiast who can code. a. and b. can only do so much: those entities will only invest a limited amount of resources into this - which is due to finacial constraints, market share ... whatever. c. could make a difference here - the bigger the more people became involved. I personally can help to grow c. I can try to do something about a. and b. - by whining at my managers or at IHVs. Which I've done already with only very limited success :( In the end of the day the only thing you and me and most everybody else here can change is c. The only other alternatives I see is to either live and arrange oneself with broken or non-existent drivers and stop complaining. or switch to Windows or any other purely commercial OS. Cheers, Egbert. -- Egbert Eich (Res. & Dev.) SUSE LINUX Products GmbH X Window System Development Tel: +49 911-740 53 0 http://www.suse.de ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org