[Sussex] Brief introduction and Ubuntu question...

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Colin Tuckley <colin at tuckley.org> writes:>
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>> and A LOT more reliably than using the supplied drivers
>> on a win2k laptop.
>
> odd, since you are really using the same drivers, just goes to show how
> buggy the Windows infrastructure layers must be.

Not to be overly defensive of Windows, but I imagine this is really
because NDISWrapper exercises less of the driver code than
Windows does.  

I'd definitely support the idea that while NDISwrapper is sometimes
useful it's far better to vote with your feet and buy kit that is
supported by F/OSS drivers.

Following on from that thought:

A lot of people are very vocal and moan like hell to hardware
manufacturers when they don't support kit (or at least give out the
necessary information to allow developers to make F/OSS drivers), but
I think it's about time we started letting companies know that we've
chosen to buy their kit _because_ it's supported.  

Because of the nature of the F/OSS market its hard for companies to
get a real picture of how large the market is.  Right now a lot of
hardware companies see our community as a minority group of techies.
They see that the number of units of Mandrake and SuSE sold by PC
World is quite low and their only contact with the community is the
occasional e-mail moaning about their lack of support.   Now, if the
got e-mails from people saying:

"Hi, I bought a <piece of kit> because there is an excellent F/OSS
driver for it here <insert URL>.   If this driver had not been
available I would have bought <alternative piece of kit>."

... then they may start to take a more active interest. 

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org