Why do some in the Linux community treat ndiswrapper with such contempt? It seems to me that if something works, especially as well as ndiswrapper, what damned difference does it make if the device drivers were written for use in Windows? I rather think that the concept should be expanded to include the universe of devices that are not currently useable with Linux due to unavailable drivers. IMHO, ndiswrapper is a good thing in that it allows us to use hardware that we otherwise would not be able to use. Hopefully, some of these chip manufacturers will provide native Linux drivers. On the down side, since we can use the Windows drivers on Linux, there is less of an incentive for
On Tuesday 19 September 2006 9:45 pm, Stevens wrote:
them to produce a Linux kernel driver.
For a very long time, we've seen many chip manufacturers who refuse to
produce open source drivers because they do not want to open up their
interfaces and secrets to the world. Companies like nVidia and ATI provide
binary Linux drivers, but no open source. Other companies may just not have
the software engineering staff to produce a driver. But, our open source
community will simply reverse engineer drivers.
the key to fixing this is in the enterprise. This is where the big
enterprise vendors, like IBM and HP support Linux on their products and
need to make sure that Linux can run on them.
--
Jerry Feldman