Devel Digest, Vol 38, Issue 1

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Thursday 02 Apr 2009 8:21:27 pm Mitch Bradley wrote:
> I guess the main disconnect is that, for the FOSS community, the point
> of view is more important than the product.  The commercial world is
> just the opposite.
This is too broad a statement and rather unfair to those who have worked hard 
to get many products to integrate smoothly into Linux. Greg Kroah-Hartman is 
on record offering free driver development (even for hardware requiring NDA):
  http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2007/1/30/49154

So the issue is not one of cost, knowledge, skill or NDA but the fear of 
intellectual property theft. The downside to closed driver development is the 
increased cost of testing and integration with specific kernels. Of course, 
public developers will be reluctant to debug or trace kernels using closed 
source drivers so the entire cost burden will fall on the vendor.

FOSS community uses products too :-).

Subbu