DISQUS

Brooks Moses · 5 months ago

Hmm. I'm not so sure I'd discount your initial thought, and whether Red Hat et al might include the drivers or not. Red Hat at least is a large enough company to make decisions for largely financial rather than dogmatic reasons, and whether including the drivers means more sales of hosted Red Hat systems or fewer sales of their hosting systems is not something I think is immediately clear. Similarly, Canonical has a very good reason to be an enabler for sales of Hyper-V in this way -- they get more users out of it (and it may well be something their users will start asking for).

More particularly, it's at worst a prisoner's-dilemma problem. If one supplier produces a distribution with Microsoft's drivers, they'll capture all that market until another supplier also produces such a thing. The only significant benefit to not supporting the Microsoft drivers is if everyone does that -- and, given Linux, that seems entirely unlikely.

DGentry · 5 months ago

Its possible. Another snippet I saw this morning implied that the drivers Microsoft released had been violating the GPL by statically linking to GPLd code, and releasing the source was a way to get positive press from something they were going to have to do anyway (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/23/microso...). I don't really buy this explanation, large companies tend to view the GPL as being toothless and don't generally respond so quickly.