Some companies are paranoid whilst others are cheapskates who don’t want their customers to know that the wizz-bang video card is just one big software driven plastic board. I would love that to happen, I am a strong believer in opensource drivers, however, one has to be a realist and realise that not all people share that same belief. Now Linus has claimed that *HE* shouldn’t need to provide backwards compatibility and instead, driver manufacturers should opensource their drivers and work within the kernel source tree. Sure, I *COULD* forcefully insmod it, however, the end result is that compatibility is done at the risk of instability, which is unacceptable. Sure, I can understand the need to break compatibility between major releases things change, bugs are found and compatibility has to be put behind quality, however, I do find it rather rediculous that one cannot run a driver compiled against 2.4.21 on 2.4.22. Is it really necessary to break compatibility? I would love to see native drivers, however, when you have the kernel each path release, that is, 2.4.21 to 2.4.22, compatibility is broken. Hardware is a big barrier for Linux and a lot of people like me dual boot still, so any technology that allows more of us to flick over permanently to Linux can only be healthy. Perhaps the Linux community could learn a trick or two from Microsoft? They came from well behind in the spreadsheet market to dominate it with Excel by removing the barriers for people to move both back *and* forth between 123 and Excel: If not then eventually there will be enough demand for them to consider making a native driver. If it’s brilliant, then there’s no need for a native driver (why would a manufacturer want two separate codebases to maintain?). But either way it will enable more people to readily migrate to using Linux as their primary OS.

A compatability layer like this will either be *so* good that there will be no need for native drivers, or (more likely) will be somewhat inefficient. Demand will only come from a lot more people using Linux and asking for native drivers, either because they cant get them or because the ones that other people have coded arent up to scratch.ģ. As much as we would like otherwise, most hardware manufacturers will only develop native drivers for Linux if they have an economic incentive to – if there is enough demand to warrant their expenditure on coding and maintaining them.Ģ.

Linux to windows software wrapper