[Halfmanhalfamazing]

It seems that there’s been a bit of misunderstanding of what’s been posted.

—————Won’t happen. There are way too many devices where the hardware manufacturer is the sole supplier of the driver.-—————

The point of open source drivers is full circumvention of the hardware manufacturer.

-——————But it ain’t gonna happen with that 256bit fancy pants video card————————

Both Intel, and more important AMD(Think ATI Radeon cards such as the $500 plus top of the line 6990) cards do very much indeed offer open source drivers for their chips. Just recently, they released the open source driver for the very newest line, the 7xxx.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4MzM

—————If the manufacturers aren’t willing to make a version friendly with a Mac Pro (in the case with high end video cards) they aren’t gonna bother with Linux—————

Again, you’re missing the point. The manufacturer doesn’t have to lift a finger in many cases. They can. Many do. But all they really have to do is release specifications, and somebody else will do the rest of the work.

AMD’s efforts are a great example of this. Who is building AMD’s open source driver for it’s cards? Well AMD is, obviously, for one. But who else? Redhat. Novell. And any other company or random developer who wishes to contribute.

[Dr. Sivana]

The point of open source drivers is full circumvention of the hardware manufacturer.

I specifically mentioned proprietary, because many of the proprietary manufacturers do not release the specs. A lot of the open source drivers I have seen over the years have either been glitchy, or just did not make full use of the hardware's features. It's not the open source communities fault, trying to reverse engineer a software modem or a non-TWAIN compliant scanner with special features is more than a little challenging. I'm glad that AMD is opening specs for their video cards, but I cannot wait 1-2 years or never for someone to write a driver for a new version of an OS. I had to retire a Canon fax/laser printer and a Visioneer Strobe Pro Scanner when I went to the 64 bit version of Windows 7 from 32 bit XP. Canon made a high end $15,000 copier that they refused to make 64 bit drivers for, and either complete specs aren't properly codified, or it is not worth anybody's while to make the drivers. I know this group's plans is to change that. My belief is that the hardware vendors aren't willing to do their part (release full specs, much less consistently conform to emerging standards) and that the well-meaning open source community won't be able to generate good drivers in a timely manner.