TCB13 , 1 month ago

Do you trust non-open drivers from Corporation X or Government Y in your eyes telling your brain what you do or don’t see?

I agree with your point, but I find it very unlikely to have cutting edge medical technology using open-source software - after all those pacemaker / brain implant companies want to protect their research (and profits) - and I’m not even sure if a FOSS solution for that would ever get approved by any legal body.

That’s the extreme, of course, but it isn’t any less scary than computers you trust with your credit card, bank account, etc information.

All those systems that process your financial transitions run on tons of proprietary software and the banks and credit card companies believe that software is secure enough.

Open source drivers means when corporation X goes under, your hardware still can work and isn’t automatically abandoned. It keeps more hardware out of landfills longer, with the ability to drastically reduce e-waste.

This is probably the most reasonable thing about having open-source drivers… however hardware is diverse and complex and so are drivers. The community might not be able to maintain such the driver for specific-version-x-hardware I have because it might not have access to all the design documentation of the hardware nor the time to reverse engineer it. It might not be worth keeping a driver around if it only serves a few people because everyone is mostly on a different revision of the hardware or some other detail like that.

To be fair Linux removed support for 386, 486, floppy drives, “Carillo Ranch”, and a bunch of other older hardware recently… at some point the few users that still have a piece of tech won’t care about it because they can just replace it by a new and better alternative for cheap.