[jdnenej]

Because all or nothing forces someone to compromise. By default almost all vendors would pick to keep things proprietary. If going open source is the only possible option then some vendors will release the source and if they don't then hobbyists will write their own drivers since the work is very useful.

Wikipedia faced a similar issue when considering using https everywhere. Some countries were blocking certain pages on Wikipedia and https would break that so it was uncertain if they would just block the whole of Wikipedia now. As it turns out they mostly did not block the whole website and those selected pages became unblocked because the alternative was given by the all or nothing approach was too far.

[izacus]

> Because all or nothing forces someone to compromise

When exactly did that work? In which project? All this attitude did was to make Linux unusable for many people, making it marginal and thus a smaller power at pushing companies to support and opensource drivers.

Things started changing AFTER more people were able to adopt it due to less black and white attitude of some distributions.

[matheusmoreira]

The Linux kernel is the best example of the success of such a strategy. The kernel's driver interfaces are unstable by design:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-...

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gcc_vs_kernel_stability.html

https://youtu.be/iiED1K98lnw

There are technical reasons for this but it also serves another purpose: maintaining leverage over companies that would take advantage. The Linux kernel receives tens of patches every hour. If companies refuse to upstream their drivers, they are left behind and must pay the maintenance costs or drop support. Their products are worse for it.

I wish every free software project had this power.

[m4rtink]

A goog example is Open WRT - the project basicaly got started due to LinkSys finally fulfilling their GPL obligation and releasing drivers to one of their Linux based wireless routers.