I am perplexed as to why hardware companies do not release their drivers under an open source liscense. In order to use the driver, someone must have already baught the product so, no lost profits. We have seen that an open developemnt model helps progress. So we would get better quality drivers and possibly more customers. Those who like compiling everything for speed would love to do so with there videocard driver, and hate the idea of a binary kernel module. Some people don't trust closed source and better drivers mean better performance which makes for a better product that can sell more.Even if a compititor were to try to reverse engineer the hardware from the driver they would not be able to compete. I will use the example of a video card, it would be too expensive to do this and it cost a lot to fab new chips, much more than it would be to buy them. Even if a company did this, by the time they would be complete the chip would be outdated.

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