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    SubjectRe: Driver removals
    Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
    > On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:08:13 EST, Bill Davidsen said:
    >
    >
    >> can never make you see why technological extortion is evil. People have
    >> always moved to new drivers without pushing because they were *better*,
    >> guess that model is dead.
    >>
    >
    > And the drivers get better because the Code Fairy comes and sprinkles magic
    > bugfix dust all over them? And the Code Fairy knows where to sprinkle bugfix
    > dust because it can see where the Bugreport Fairy sprinkled Bugreport Dust?
    >

    Drivers get better because someone who finds a benefit in them also
    finds a problem. They don't get better by developers looking for
    intermittent, probably load dependent, bugs which effect eight year old
    server hardware which was a low volume item, the developers are unlikely
    to have, and which is in use providing services, not on someone's
    desktop where it can reasonably be rebooted to test patches.
    > Yes, people will move without pushing when the drivers are better. However,
    > remember that a major cultural motivation for the GPL is the concept of "give
    > back". And if a user can't be bothered to even give back enough to say
    > "wow, this blows, my Frobnozz9800 doesn't work with this driver", that's a
    > problem with the user. They're getting it for free, they should at least
    > give the developers the kindness of a bug report if something is broken...
    >

    Not when drivers are "better" but when a new driver offers some benefit,
    be it reliability, capability, etc. When the new driver offers not a
    single benefit and the only "feature" is "possible unknown bugs," people
    are not going to change, and I don't think forcing people off working
    drivers is any more ethical than Microsoft killing XP to force people to
    VISTA. Less ethical, actually, because MSFT is looking for profit, and
    they make no pretense of caring about the users in any role but revenue
    stream.
    > <insert diatribe about users who just want free-as-in-beer>....
    >

    Insert it right next to the diatribe about developers who think that
    because some new feature was a lot of work that Linus *must* put it in
    the kernel, or users show show proper respect and gratitude and disrupt
    their production hardware to test and debug some new code which offers
    zero added functionality on that hardware. If you think downtime is
    "free" then you have not been working in the right environments, or for
    the right management.

    --
    Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
    "Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
    be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark




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