Jon maddog Hall talks about hardware in his latest column,
“Penguin’s Brew”.
“One of the most important benefits of the Linux operating
system is the number of architectures and hardware peripherals it
now supports.”
“On the issue of proprietary vs. open hardware, I am annoyed
that hardware vendors still believe their competitors are smart
enough to do reverse engineering on a product’s hardware chips, but
too dumb to disassemble a driver for a video card to find out how
that card is programmed. Due to intense pressure from the
open-source community, some of these vendors have re-examined their
strategy and put some of their specifications and sample code out
onto the Internet. Some have even worked with the Linux community
(and I assume the other open-source operating systems) to give out
copies of the hardware in time for the operating systems to
adequately support them.”