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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?

#3

Post by gjsman-1000 »

Drivers… I don’t know if I could sign on for that for the following reasons:

1. The burden it would put on smaller manufacturers and companies (every little regulation adds up), especially difficult considering the comparative lack of qualified developers

2. Drivers != Quality, Upstreamable Drivers. Making the judgements of Linux maintainers legally binding is a bad idea. Case in point: Apple has Linux drivers internally, they’re just not complete or upstreamable. You would be forced to fight the Linux maintainers (and the power trips they already have!) in order to legally sell your product.

3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc…

4. What about poor FreeBSD? Serenity OS? That guy who still loves OS/2?

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

#7

Post by smoldesu »

jandrese wrote: post #2

More likely they would require companies to publish specs suitable for driver authors. I’ve always thought that companies treating their register configuration and I/O offsets as a trade secret is ridiculous.

This sounds much more reasonable to me. Banning unnecessary hardware DRM and requiring specs to get published would be a much more effective way to stimulate the market. Forcing manufacturers to publish Linux drivers would probably just end up in low-effort support on either side. The last person I want writing my Linux drivers is someone who doesn't care.

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

#8

Post by msm_ »

jandrese wrote: post #2

More likely they would require companies to publish specs suitable for driver authors. I’ve always thought that companies treating their register configuration and I/O offsets as a trade secret is ridiculous.

This. Linked post is a misconception of how EU actually work. They will never "hardcode" something like "linux drivers" into the law. But, in theory, they could write a law like "If you want to sell your device in the EU, you must publish a freely available technical spec with enough level of detail to write a functioning driver".

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

#10

Post by loup-vaillant »

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 force them to chose: either they only sell hardware in the EU, or they only sell software. Intel and microsoft would have no problem. NVDIA might complain very loudly. Apple would likely have to split itself.

Now the complicated part is how to define a company. We don't want a single company to just split itself into 2 legal entities that work so closely together they might as well be the same company.

Do that, and you'll get much better than device drivers for one free OS. You'll get the necessary specs required to make it work on all OSes. Even better, the user-facing hardware interface will start to matter, and there will be some selection pressure to drive the more complex ones, or the non-standard ones, out of the market. (Won't be ideal, I can see a particular over-complex architecture win out, similar to x86, but at least there won't be that many left, so writing a driver for most devices will actually be possible).

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