[pxc]

Isn't Android plagued by all manner of proprietary dependencies for hardware support?

I don't understand all of the pressures on vendors in the Linux case, but at least one of them is that they can't upstream their drivers (and thus unload some of their maintenance burden on the Linux kernel team) unless they license them in a way that's considered suitable by upstream. If they don't do that, they're more likely to be broken by Linux changes, and it makes distributing their drivers more annoying because they have to do that on their own. I also vaguely recall that there are some other ways that proprietary drivers have more limited access to the Linux kernel, of access more liable to get broken by upstream, but idrk.

But isn't the biggest incentive for releasing your drivers as F/OSS (so you can upstream, making maintenance easier) still there in the FreeBSD case?

[ywvcbk]

> . If they don't do that, they're more likely to be broken by Linux changes, and it makes distributing their drivers more annoying

So the idea is that having no drivers is better than having proprietary drivers? Seems like a perfectly reasonable and sensible approach..

[exe34]

having no drivers and having drivers that no longer work because the source isn't available and the maintainers can't update them is functionality identical.

[ywvcbk]

Maybe they should stop breaking them then?

That’s a design decision, Linux maintainers decided to not have a stable ABI because they’d rather have no drivers at all than proprietary ones.

[seba_dos1]

The only decision to be made there is when to break them, not if. Linux went with "sooner than later".

[exe34]

if you prefer to have security vulnerabilities, you can always pin your kernel version?

the kernel needs to keep evolving, and the maintainers will keep your code updated for free - you just have to open source it.

[pxc]

It's a tautology that only open-source drivers will be part of the codebase of an open-source OS.

It's also more or less a given that first-party code will be better-integrated into an OS than third-party code is. That was a prevailing element of the discourse surrounding the outage CrowdStrike induced on Windows weeks ago, for instance. That's not a proposition unique to open-source operating systems. Indeed, what is unique to open-source is that is possible for outside vendors (or individuals) to put their code through a process that eventually gets it that maximal level of integration.

So, uh... no?