On Dec 7, 2006, at 7:11 AM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I really don't understand why companies that support and promote the
> idea of using open source, e.g. Sun and Apple and IBM, don't spemd a
> little more time at least putting on a good show about advocating for
> open source offerings (or at least support) from some of their  
> partners,
> such as the graphics cards makers, etc.  Don't they believe that they
> will also recieve many advantages from the shared skills of the open
> source community with drivers and such?

Sun and Apple make sure that they ship drivers with their respective  
operating systems for all of the hardware they sell; supporting third- 
party hardware or third-party operating systems which may run on Sun  
or Apple machines is fine but it is not on the same priority level.

This said, both Sun and Apple have open-sourced much of their  
operating system & driver software, but there exists significant  
resistance from ATI & nVidia about releasing their respective  
hardware APIs, because of the high level of competition in the  
graphics world over minor differences in performance and video  
quality between the two.

-- 
-Chuck

PS: I don't speak for Sun, and I don't speak for Apple.  :-)