I have to say, that I can understand this, because the specs, which are needed to develop drivers are that detailed, that another company couldget detailed informations about how the chips work form this specs and adapt them to their own developments.I know this is the fear, but as far as I know it rarely happens in practice. Has anyone ever done this on a large scale?
The only graphics-chipset manufacturer who releases the specs of it's chips is afaik ATI, and they only release the specs of outdated chipsets, because they are also worried about the technological infos in the specs. I don't think that such specs are detailed enough to rebuild a chip from this info - which would cause many low-price copies of high-end chipsets by small companies - but I think that it is possible to recognize especially the system which is used to use the high-performance operations of the chipsets. And these are the most interesting information for the competitors.
I'm really angry about people who say that everything has to be free, else it's bad. You have to recognize that opensource isn't a good solution for everything and everyone. Sometimes it is not a well idea to use opensource-licensing for software.I understand that not everyone feels the way I do. And after reading your message I decided to sign the petition. But for me, and the way I've decided to live my life, I would rather have no graphics at all than have a binary-only driver. And since there is a Free driver that does enough to show me my window manager, I'll never use a proprietary binary.
I accept it, if someone wants do to it this way, but I never would do it this way, because my main interest is to get the things working, I need. And if there is no open way to get these things working I have no problem with going a non-open way - as long as I am sure that the used source works almost stable and don't does things I don't want it to do (like microsoft-code does).
But I read someone that an Broadcom 802.11g driver for Linux is in work and will be released sometime in the mid-summer.Ooh, I hadn't heard this. Do you mean that people are writing a driver that will be Free, or that Broadcom is going to release a binary?
I read it here: http://returntonature.com/pipermail/linux-sony/2003-February/003247.html
I bet the drivers will be closed source. Because opensource drivers won't be far away from releasing specs which Broadcom seems to never do.
But we'll see. Best regards, Julian