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Won’t happen. There are way too many devices where the hardware manufacturer is the sole supplier of the driver. Even serious attempts to standardize (e.g. Postscript) have no good way to anticipate new features to make full use of the hardware in question.

A lot of the stuff is pretty standard already... SATA, monitors, USB 1.1 through 3, Firewire.

But it ain’t gonna happen with that 256bit fancy pants video card ... or with that specialty two sided sheetfed scanner. 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, which is mostly in the server and hobbbyist and low-end consumer arena.

There are way too many devices where the hardware manufacturer is the sole supplier of the driver.

Exactly. This is complete nonsense. How can you have proprietary hardware and no proprietary drivers? What is everyone suppose to do? Stop inovating and sit around waiting for someone else to make a new industry standard? To make all their stuff open source? Screw that.
There is a place for propriatary drivers and there is a place for plug and play simplicty.

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.