> "giving any support at all to open source drivers"
Since when is a hardware company obligated to give support to open source drivers??? Really? Really.
1. A hardware company can choose to sell its products to whatever class of customers it likes. It doesn't have to cater to a particular subset of philosophical adherents, when marketing a product. It might not be realistic to ask a person to pay money for a product, when they can only marshal so many hands from a finite set of costly human resources, to meet the demands of a certain type of customer.
2. It makes sense for a small hardware company to cater to users of for-profit proprietary operating systems, mostly because there's hard incentive for makers of proprietary libraries to support their software in kind (ie: you can enforce an annual contract against Microsoft, but GNU?). This is the exact business model that Microsoft has preyed upon and grown fat off of for years.
3. The open source community has a reputation for taking on all comers. This is to say that when the going gets tough, and there's real demand for something awesome, the open source community will step up and brute force a project into submission. We have a reputation for pulling our own weight when it counts.
I don't think it's correct to frown upon a hardware company because it doesn't cater to open source philosophies. It's not always easy to turn that kind of pie-in-the-sky demand into something that pays the very real bills.
I think it's correct to frown upon a company that espouses vehement animosity towards a hacker community that it could wisely cultivate as a neutral ally, that neither helps nor harms profits. Companies that actively spearhead campaigns of criminal prosecution and litigation against hobbyists that mean no harm (and often increase demand, or frequently support their own demand) ...that kind of behavior is toxic.
In other words:
if people buy your goods, they should feel free to use them as the please, and if they figure out new unintended uses for those goods, great! But that doesn't obligate the maker to now support an unexpected, unplanned emergent behavior, however popular it may be.
Since when is a hardware company obligated to give support to open source drivers??? Really? Really.
1. A hardware company can choose to sell its products to whatever class of customers it likes. It doesn't have to cater to a particular subset of philosophical adherents, when marketing a product. It might not be realistic to ask a person to pay money for a product, when they can only marshal so many hands from a finite set of costly human resources, to meet the demands of a certain type of customer.
2. It makes sense for a small hardware company to cater to users of for-profit proprietary operating systems, mostly because there's hard incentive for makers of proprietary libraries to support their software in kind (ie: you can enforce an annual contract against Microsoft, but GNU?). This is the exact business model that Microsoft has preyed upon and grown fat off of for years.
3. The open source community has a reputation for taking on all comers. This is to say that when the going gets tough, and there's real demand for something awesome, the open source community will step up and brute force a project into submission. We have a reputation for pulling our own weight when it counts.
I don't think it's correct to frown upon a hardware company because it doesn't cater to open source philosophies. It's not always easy to turn that kind of pie-in-the-sky demand into something that pays the very real bills.
I think it's correct to frown upon a company that espouses vehement animosity towards a hacker community that it could wisely cultivate as a neutral ally, that neither helps nor harms profits. Companies that actively spearhead campaigns of criminal prosecution and litigation against hobbyists that mean no harm (and often increase demand, or frequently support their own demand) ...that kind of behavior is toxic.
In other words:
if people buy your goods, they should feel free to use them as the please, and if they figure out new unintended uses for those goods, great! But that doesn't obligate the maker to now support an unexpected, unplanned emergent behavior, however popular it may be.