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That seems pretty unlikely for a mid sized, independently operated/capitalized Japanese company tbh.
Unless they want easy money. Show me a modern mid-sized, independently operated/capitalized corporation that doesn't want it.
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Just because it would be better doesn't mean it will be made. So long as something is "good enough", it will strangle new projects in the crib.
1. Did you reply to the wrong comment? I was only remarking on the Linux driver not being buggy. 2. If you’re referring to a Windows open source Wacom driver, one already exists, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, though it has a pretty specific purpose in mind. https://github.com/hawku/TabletDriver
I assumed your comment was also about that, I didn't expect that you were ignoring the context of the conversation and just commenting about whether the current driver was buggy or not. Sorry.
Really great article. But I wonder, why the author did not cover if/what the driver publishes, If I do: - open "Wacom Desktop Center" - Top right (next to "Login") is "More" (click!) - "Data Privacy Settings" (click!) - "Participate In Wacom Experience Program" => on => off! My setting was "On" - and I swear: whenever a program/website/installer asks I go "No thankx". So it must be dark UI patterns with evil defaults…
Or you could vote with your wallet and buy a Huion instead. They are just as good, if not better. And about half the price. It's all made in China any way.
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Unless they want easy money. Show me a modern mid-sized, independently operated/capitalized corporation that doesn't want it.
Can you point me towards the marketplace where I can sell data I've siphoned off? Thanks!
It makes little real sense for Wacom, a manufacturer of tablets, to capture this amount of data, and doing so has a cost. But it makes heaps of sense for Google to do it since they can infer all sorts of stuff from the applications you install.
It also explains why this crap is so pervasive, why the privacy policy is so vague (Wacom may not even know the extent of the exfiltration - don’t ask don’t tell), and why the quality of the data collection is so good.
I mean I’m guessing there a google product called something like “Google Analytics for OSX Drivers” and google would want that in popular products.
These sort of back room deals and outreach programs are pretty common in general, but if I’m right, then Wacom, while certainly an accomplice, is not the root cause of this.
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Windows users should push for FOSS drivers as well also when the proprietary ones run perfectly. Privacy and security issues aside, being forced to depend on a closed driver means that the manufacturer can make the product obsolete just by stopping support on newer Windows versions, therefore turning the product essentially into trash, thus forcing the user to buy a new one.
The vast majority of Windows users don't really care about that though. In the 90s, software modems ("winmodems", see [0]) were popular because they were cheaper than using dedicated hardware for generating and decoding the audio signals sent over the phone line. Those would break if the manufacturer didn't upgrade their driver for newer versions of Windows, since they're completely software driven. I'd be very surpr…
Now most Linux distributions are littered with binary blobs in linux-firmware that have to be loaded for everything from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth. We've gone the total opposite direction of where we should be .. except for like .. amdgpu.
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Open source drivers are rare on Windows because manufacturers almost always ship proprietary drivers that are good enough, and Windows users clearly have no issues running closed-source software. Proprietary drivers on Linux are often crap, if they even exist at all.
>Proprietary drivers on Linux are often crap, if they even exist at all. Not so with Nvidia GPUs. The open drivers are awful; the proprietary drivers are good. (But IS the case with AMD GPUs, to the point where the proprietary driver seems to perform worse[0] and everyone pretends it doesn't even exist, which is upside down unintuitive coming from A.) Windows and B.) Nvidia.) 0: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page…
I wonder what the comfortable medium between privacy and letting developers get feedback about how well their code works is. It seems to me like Wacom just wants to know if their drivers work, so they can focus engineering efforts around fixing the issues that are affecting their users. "Oh hey, the new beta of Photoshop breaks our drivers!" They don't make a "cloud product" and they have an obligation to make their…
To me the comfortable medium is 100% privacy. 0% feedback. There is no middle ground because feedback and privacy should not be conflated. Users already own the device and owe no data to their vendor.
Some stuff is going to get through, but it should just be because you missed it. I'm sorry FOSS people; everyone is collecting way too much and I don't want to give Mozilla my data either. No, not even crash reports.