Dell pushes for linux hardware support

[Tux Aubrey]

I guess this is to be expected, but its nice to hear it from the horse's mouth:

Desktop Linux reports John Hull of Dell (http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8985411276.html), referring to the May 24 lauch of their Ubuntu powered machines, as saying:


"For hardware options not offered with this release, we are working with the vendors of those devices to improve the maturity and stability of their associated Linux drivers. While this may not happen overnight, we do expect to have a broader range of hardware support with Linux over time."

This was certainly the effect I was hoping for!

[gvoima]

This is infact a good thing, never thought of this :)

But it would be even more better if the open source community could improve and help improving the drivers, proprietary isn't always a good thing :neutral:

IMHO it's the vast free software community that makes linux so great.

[Polygon]

but what license will these drivers be licensed under though?

[Ziox]

Let's hope that Dell is able to pressure the companies enough so that their propriety drivers will become more compatible with Linux distributions. Of course, it would be even better if they were to open source (or relax the licensing) of their drivers.

[Adamant1988]

but what license will these drivers be licensed under though?

Probably a license that won't play nicely with the GPL.

[igknighted]

This is infact a good thing, never thought of this :)

But it would be even more better if the open source community could improve and help improving the drivers, proprietary isn't always a good thing :neutral:

IMHO it's the vast free software community that makes linux so great.

There is not much the OSS community can do for devices that have no drivers and no specs. They really need a place to start from. If Dell just gets them to release some specs to OSS devs, then we can write the drivers and add them to the kernel, but it will be forever and a day without it. Don't put this on the community, they are doing all they can short of requiring anyone downloading a distro to learn a programing language and chip in... the ball is in the court of hardware manufacturers, and Dell to get out of them what they can.

[WalmartSniperLX]

I wouldnt care if they arent going to license the drivers under the GPL or any other opensource license. The thing that matters most is that Linux may see better hardware support in the near future.