The Problem with "Free"

[dibl]

This poor fellow's misery got me thinking today about why us Linux users are no more than 2% of the population of PC users, and about the largest obstacles to a higher level of Linux adoption:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...cseen#msg79039

It seems to boil down to this: The designers and builders of computer hardware consist of "for profit" organizations and their "for profit" employees. Put plainly, they are market-driven capitalists. To sell their goods into the market, they have to provide drivers to the mass that runs Windows. But those Windows-using folks have no expectation of "free", either as beer or speech, so there's no inherent conflict (I'm conveniently ignoring software piracy...).

Our little 2% market, however, contains a considerable proportion of ideologues who believe (rightly or wrongly -- I don't pass judgment on it) that software should be "free", as in beer or speech or both.

It seems there is an inherent conflict between the capitalist hardware organizations, who write Windows drivers for money (through sale of the package), and the Linux market, which seeks software for free. The desirable transaction between the supplier and consumer is doomed, due to a failure to agree on price.

It's interesting to contemplate what could happen to the Linux consumer market if there were a Canonical-like organization, with funding, that would pay hardware designers a reasonable fee for the technical data needed to write Linux drivers, and then prioritize and staff driver development for popular hardware items.

Today's two cents' worth, I guess.

EDIT: Thank you, Nvidia.

[askrieger]

Re: The Problem with "Free"

I think the problem is two sided.

From the hardware manufacturer's viewpoint, he payed "real money" to design the interface between his card and the computer. He reveals the details of this interface to M$ under a (nearly one-sided) non-disclosure agreement, because he doesn't want his competitors to learn the specific tricks he used. Now, the Linux community comes along and asks him to make his interface public. If his market share is large (as is the case for display adaptors, where there are only two major competitors, he can afford to provide closed source drivers. If he has a numerous competitors none of whom have a large market share (as is the case for wireless adaptors), he can barely afford to meet M$'s demands. The sound card market is somewhere in between.

From the Linux developer's side, a developer who undertakes to build an open source driver for a device has to either own one that she really, Really, REALLY needs, or has to believe that the significant effort involved in reverse engineering the driver will be repaid in the satisfaction of seeing a lot of people adopt the SW, gratitude, and/or acclaim. Again this makes it more likely that a widely used product with only a few competitors will get attention while a product with many competitors won't.

I would have thought that the sound card market had few enough competitors to make it worthwhile for both sides to provide drivers, and, indeed, because I never buy the latest and greatest card, I've never had a problem with getting a sound driver.