Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Andy Green wrote:
>
>> The issue is theoretical at best. In the unlikely event that access to
>> a video card breaks due to undiscovered bugs in the original _and_
>> vendor refusal to fix it, I'd expect it to be cheaper to either replace
>> Linux or the card than to hire an expert to temporarily revive the
>> now-dead combination.
>
> Well whatever your other complaints, I really don't think you take into
> account the developer suffering that happens from the unsupported
> reverse engineering aspect that is often part of the drivers.
Not only do I not take it into account, I can't understand why anyone
thinks this is desirable compared to using drivers written and
maintained by the engineers that build the hardware and have the test
equipment to diagnose it.
It's desirable when the device you want a driver for otherwise drags in
Windows as a "dependency". That puts you into a situation where your
choice of video card or whatever is making the decisions about security
policy for you, and all the other areas that the choice of OS touches on.
> More than that though I myself have taken advantage of a kernel
driver
> blowing a panic to look through the source and fix the problem, and send
> a patch describing and fixing to problem, which was accepted.
Again, this doesn't sound like a desirable scenario compared to using
something that already works.
You never had a closed source driver with a bug in? There's nothing for
you to do but make a bug report and wait.
-Andy