Quite the reverse appears to be happening right now.
> openly the source to what they perceive as a major source of their income.
> Granted it will more likely happen with more specialized, high end hardware,
> unless it is the case where it is just too easy to install and use, to not
> buy, as with OSS.
There are two problems. Firstly the moment you add a binary only driver
no current vendor will ship it, nor for that matter are the likely to in
future. Think about the support issue. You've just tied yourself to a
vendor. How can say Red Hat support a third party binary module.
Secondly and related to this. Everyone will turn around and say "talk to
the module vendor". Most of us do that now. Bug reports I get that include
binary only modules go in the bitbucket and I tell people to talk to the
module vendor - only they can debug anything.
There are very few hardware vendors who have any real intellectual property
value in the code to drive their devices. There are exceptions but not that
many.
Also your comment on the high end is actually often the least problematic.
When the board does everything itself the OS interface tends to become
"put that here, fetch me 5 of those" and isolated from the magic in the cards.
The margin on low end hardware is low, very low. Vendors cant really afford
serious software development. Thats one reason things like USB are going
more and more to standards based interfaces. At the point where the connector
pricing is an issue (as in the choice of the USB connector), the margin
to write good software is not there.
Alan
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