Re: Check this out

> No. The basic drivers, like PCI, CPU etc are really in the kernel.
> But the others, like VGA drivers are outside, mostly in userspace.
> But I don't know why is it problem? The problem is when a driver is
> bad, and drives hardware to crash the whole computer, by blocking
> the bus or something. It's very common with AGP cards, it's easy to setup
> wrong bus timings and it will crash the mainboard.

So Linux is just as stable as W2K can be (maybe 98 too) ! Because when 
Windows crashed it's usually because of hardware problems, or you're 
running a crap shareware program. It's usually not the OS.

>>You can't blame the manufacturer for a poorly developped driver.
>>Linux is not a supported system, that's what make it usable only by a 
>>few people.
> 
> 
> Or, if you plan to use linux, but hardware which is well supported.
> And there will not be problems. We're designing and building computers for
> linux systems, for embedded applications and servers, and there are no
> driver issues, as we choose the supported LAN cards etc...
> If you buy hardware with zero or experimental drivers, it's your fault, and
> also the hw manufacturers fault. I doubt that you'll buy unsupported
> hardware for your windows machine... for example something with no XP
> drivers when you're using it. And you won't blame the manufacturer for
> missing drivers? For example, one of my friends used win nt for ages, and
> has very expensive video editing cards, and he is really upset as the
> manufacturer doesn't develop win2k/xp drivers for the card.
> And, the other card he bought has only win2k/xp drivers... so he has to
> reboot between nt and 2k all time...

Yep, at least he has the NT drivers. And never knew if there would be 
W2K drivers, especially if W2K didn't exist at that time.

I think the main problem in Linux (the kernel) IS the GPL. Big or small 
companies are afraid of it. Because it helps competitors. Now nVidia 
released some binary drivers and it's working well. Hopefully other big 
names will do the same. But so far it doesn't seem to be the case. And I 
don't see any sign of changes.

On the contrary I think Apple has found the right (best so far) place 
between openess and closed apps/drivers. Also they have a professional 
team of developpers working on their system, with priorities and 
user/buyer oriented. That's also something missing in the Linux 
anarchical world. And they still can use open softwares like XFree on 
their system. That's because they use the BSD license (or APL) which is 
more friendly to closed source apps, and still allow any developper to 
modify/improve the code.

That's one of the thing I don't like with GPL. It's a virus, and as a 
virus it can have many bad effects. I've worked on a license that is 
currently submited to the OSI board for open source compliance. It's a 
mix of many good points of many known licenses. It's very open, and 
virus type too. But guess what, it's not GPL compatible and will never 
be (you'll have to dual license for that). Even though it does the same 
and better (IMO). Just because the private/public modifications must be 
given to the Copyright Holder of the software on demand (more efficient 
virus).

> anyway it's very offtopic here, don't you think?

Yep. But more ppl could join the conversation :)