MS has had driver development kits for many years. I suspect that if
we had LGPL DDK for device vendors, we would have better support from
these vendors. I realize that many vendors think that they have
valuable IP to protect, no doubt trained into them by MS. Other than
video card vendors they generally have nothing in reality. All
networking is standards based, as is pretty much all other standard
I/O. Even exotics like GPIB (which is slowly disappearing) are
standards based.
You’re almost exactly two years too late. The Linux driver project was launched then and there are now 400 developers working on Linux drivers for hardware vendors.
When do you think they will meet their objectives, given the relatively short life of hardware product these days?
Initially, they found it difficult to get hardware vendors interested but Greg’s latest report mentioning the 400 developers indicated that they are now getting a steady stream of requests.
One problem in the past has been that hardware developers used to write new code for each new device. They are beginning to realise that, with Linux, they can reuse code from previous hardware and that this will considerably reduce time to launch for new products.
Getting the new mindset will probably be the single most important factor in ensuring that hardware is naturally launched with Linux drivers.