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DouglasAWh
April 20th, 2009, 09:25 PM
I work in the Windows world, sadly. We have some issues distributing drivers occasionally. Is there a good place to look for FOSS Windows drivers? I'm sure there's not a huge market for it, but I thought I'd see if there was a site out there.

Specifically, in this case we are looking for a Verizon broadband card. Are there any Verizon cards out there that work well with Linux? Perhaps I can steer the purchasing decision in the future (we do have some Linux running here already, but would do more if certain things worked).

Thanks!
juancarlospaco
April 20th, 2009, 10:35 PM
Mayor Windows Drivers are Closed Source, binary blobs.
DouglasAWh
April 21st, 2009, 12:30 AM
Mayor Windows Drivers are Closed Source, binary blobs.

"Mayor"?

is that supposed to be major or many or what?

They can't all be closed, because there are open hardware manufacturers out there.
juancarlospaco
April 21st, 2009, 01:19 AM
major, sorry im not perfect.
They can... Windows users dont take care, about open or closed drivers
DouglasAWh
April 21st, 2009, 02:36 AM
They can... Windows users dont take care, about open or closed drivers

Nope, they can't, not according to this anyway;
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/#drivers

Plus what about OpenMoko and other open hardware? You're telling me they *all* produce closed source drivers for Windows? Doesn't make any sense.
Bölvağur
April 21st, 2009, 02:47 AM
Nope, they can't, not according to this anyway;
http://osswin.sourceforge.net/#drivers

Plus what about OpenMoko and other open hardware? You're telling me they *all* produce closed source drivers for Windows? Doesn't make any sense.

Ok this has been dealt with before on the subject of why there used to be (at the time there were) few linux drivers.

The thing is that the manufacturers feel like they are giving away important information about their hardware to their competition. And therefore they often try to avoid opening their drivers, and when I say often I mean almost every single time, even though times are changing. There are few open source drivers available made by the manufacturers but that is a very small group.
That is the reason why it was hell to get some hardware working in linux (man I love how good it is becomming<3).

Btw openmoko has nothing to do with windows (why did I just write that...)... it is a business with way different vision from the mainstream hardware vendors.