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Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

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Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#161

Post by scarface_74 »

fooker wrote: post #155
scarface_74 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many flawed analogies here it’s hard to know where to start. How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration of software and hardware between my Mac, iPads Watch, Airpods and phone? Windows laptops are worse in every vector than MacBooks. No consumer is asking for this. So you want to degrade the user experience for “freedom” by giving the government more power…

What if by letting this anti-competitive monopolies survive, we are getting future better ‘everyday experiences’ killed in their cribs? Large companies routinely buy out startups, kill their products, and absorbs the teams.

Well, we have three examples of well resourced companies that weren’t able to compete in the smart phone market - Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.

You really think a little startup is going to be able to do hardware at scale?

Was it big bad Apple that killed all of those phones or maybe it is just consumers made a choice using their own free will?

You really think that the startups didn’t have “being bought by a big company” as an exit strategy in the first place?

Out of all the companies that YC has funded (1000+) only six have ever gone public.

Were all the little companies that Apple acquired to integrate into their phone in an alternate universe going to create a phone?

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#162

Post by scarface_74 »

smoldesu wrote: post #151
scarface_74 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can seamlessly share standard Bluetooth devices between 5 devices just by pairing it to one like I do with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, MacBook and AppleTV and it automatically switches?

Yeah. Multipoint connection has been a part of the Bluetooth spec since 4.0. Compatible devices will connect to anything available nearby and negotiate audio to whichever device pressed 'play' last. No iCloud mumbo-jumbo required, it was smoother than the Airpods experience when I was using it.

And how many “multipoint” devices support an unlimited number of devices? I currently have 2 AppleTVs, a MacBook, iPad, an iPhone and an Apple Watch all paired to my AirPods .

What’s the pairing process like? Mine is just - sign into iCloud and my AirPods show up.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#163

Post by pandaman »

mschuster91 wrote: post #123
pandaman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you wrote drivers? Writing a driver off documentation is: a) very hard, how do you debug anything without JTAG ports and simulators? and b) not correct on principle because the documentation is not the hardware, there are errata in the hardware so what documentation says is not always what the hardware does and there are mistakes in the documentation for the same outcome. >The only ones in trouble would be the v…

> Writing a driver off documentation is: a) very hard, how do you debug anything without JTAG ports and simulators? and b) not correct on principle because the documentation is not the hardware, there are errata in the hardware so what documentation says is not always what the hardware does and there are mistakes in the documentation for the same outcome. I agree with you, no system (particularly not something as com…

>And yet, we have Apple, whose hardware quality alone is good enough for a dedicated team to reverse engineer and write drivers for, with almost zero documentation available.

Apple own software is pretty janky, my current MacBook cannot bring up GPU after sleep about once a month and needs a reboot to begin drawing GUI correctly again, used to be dying completely waking up before it was fixed couple OS updates back. My previous MacBook could not stay on WiFi for more than a couple hours straight, never had been fixed.

Also, reversing an existing working driver is different from writing a driver from scratch. In one case you just need to repeat the functionality, produce the same outputs for the same inputs, the quality of hardware is orthogonal here since it's already worked around in the existing driver. It's orders of magnitude easier than writing the thing from scratch.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#164

Post by jandrese »

scarface_74 wrote: post #59
kichimi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any point of substance to make here? What do you mean by it sucked, and how does that relate to publishing driver specs?

Yes, it’s a dumb idealistic idea that never worked in practice. Geeks spent forever trying to get crappy drivers working IRQ conflicts fixed, etc. It wasn’t until Windows 95 and WinHec and “Plug and Play” that x86 based PCs became usable for the mass market

That was largely hardware issues. In particular without a way to negotiate between drivers conflicts were doomed to happen regardless of who was writing the driver, especially with the relatively small number of resources to pull from.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#165

Post by crote »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #10

They don't necessarily have to: there's another, more comprehensive hammer they (or the US for that matter) could use: disallow vertical integration. Force hardware vendors to only sell hardware. If any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits. Even firmware. Conversely, software vendors can only sell (or freely distribute) software. For vendors from abroad, don't go extra-territorial, just…

This is completely impossible with any hardware made in the last 20 years or so.

The problem is that you cannot make a hard distinction between hardware and software. An Intel CPU simply isn't going to run without microcode, and having to get rid of microcode would easily set back chip design by a decade.

Even something as trivial as a USB cable isn't pure hardware anymore. It has a programmable eMarker in order to advertise its capabilities, so it is also a combination of hardware and software. Everything but completely trivial chips has some kind of computation embedded in it, requiring some firmware.

Chips are complicated and weird. Pretty much nobody writes code which directly interacts with hardware. Even people who write code for embedded microprocessors will use an SDK provided by the chip manufacturer to smooth out the nastiest details. How's that supposed to work when the hardware vendor can no longer provide any software?

And then there's the question of what exactly constitutes "firmware". Is code in a separate programmable flash chip okay if they hardwire the Write Protect pin? What if the exact same code is stored in programmable space in the MCU itself? Is it fine to place that code in One-Time-Programmable memory? Bake it into the chip during wafer manufacturing? If anything, being able to update the firmware in the field is better for the consumer when it comes to fixing bugs.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#166

Post by scarface_74 »

hooooopa wrote: post #160
scarface_74 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does that mean Apple can’t release anything until it goes through a standards body?

Scarface, Apple doesn't love you back.

Well neither does the government. At least Apple doesn’t have guns to force me to do what it wants.

How hard is it for you not to use Apple products? Are you incapable of using your own free will?

Between Apple and the government, guess which one has the power to take away your free will?

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#168

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

scarface_74 wrote: post #59
kichimi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any point of substance to make here? What do you mean by it sucked, and how does that relate to publishing driver specs?

Yes, it’s a dumb idealistic idea that never worked in practice. Geeks spent forever trying to get crappy drivers working IRQ conflicts fixed, etc. It wasn’t until Windows 95 and WinHec and “Plug and Play” that x86 based PCs became usable for the mass market

Maybe, but that's a separate matter from publishing specs that would let someone write a driver.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#169

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #135
mnd999 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much more EU style directive would be to force all operating systems to use the Linux 5.1 kernel.

A much more EU style directive would be to force all operating systems to ask on every boot: Do you consent for this OS to store files on your hard drive?

No, the EU version of that would be requiring OSs to ask before using a disk, and certain proprietary OSs deciding to spam the user with requests on every boot until they consent - at which point suddenly the OS can magically remember that preference - and then pretending that the law forced them to do that even though it said no such thing.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#170

Post by userbinator »

I'd rather they force them to release documentation instead, documentation which they certainly already have, and which hardware manufacturers used to freely provide.

If they're worried about IP, that's what the patent system is for.

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