Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ywvcbk 621 days ago
> . 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..
2 comments
exe34 621 days ago
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.
link
ywvcbk 621 days ago
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.

link
seba_dos1 621 days ago
The only decision to be made there is when to break them, not if. Linux went with "sooner than later".
link
exe34 621 days ago
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.

link
pxc 621 days ago
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?

link