> ... the support cycle of the company might not overlap with the > intended lifecycle of the piece of hardware and I'd rather not toss > out a good piece of hardware just because the OS changed it's APIs and > the manufacturer decided that they got my money two years ago and > there is no point in giving me a working driver now. > >> and takes full advantage of the >> hardware, then an "open" driver that sucks. > > The open driver will become better over time. There is no guarantee > for the closed driver. > So you will buy hardware which you can't use now, (such as onboard h264 decoding) because of a poor driver, with the hope that the driver will be written by someone... someday... (which there is no guarantee) over hardware which does work today - and you could use forever, as long as you don't update your other software to an incompatible version.... I don't follow the logic. If intel had a linux driver that actually worked properly, and utilized all the hardware they are selling, that would be great. But to date, they don't. And they use the "its open" excuse to pretend that its not their fault the driver still sucks, when the reality is that they just don't put the necessary resources into it. Meanwhile, NVidia at least is putting their own resources into writing a _good_ driver for linux. Would it be nice if it were open? Sure. But I'm not going to reward Intel with a hardware purchase simply because they throw out some specifications and say there you go, you can write a driver if you like.... Dan