On Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:10:43 +0000, rallee2{at}comcast.net wrote:

>  IMHO offerring instances of how a manufacturer writes drivers for 
>non-mainstream systems, especially if said drivers can be easily ported
to OS2 is 
>hardly off-topic, 

Sure, when it's applicable.  In this case, it's not.

> nVidia's drivers, while distributed as a recommended binary install,
can also be 
>run with a switch to extract source.

That is just the kernel module - it is NOT the driver itself, which is an X module!  
They are *required* to provide the source to the kernel module, or it just plain 
wouldn't work on many user's machines!  If this wasn't a requirement, I doubt they 
would even provide that.  Nvidia also provides code for the open source driver 
that comes with X, but that has far fewer features (no 3D, no DVI, etc.).

> I never expected to see SBLive drivers 

Whole different animal - the ALSA drivers have complete source available.  
That's where UniAudio comes from.

>  As fior OS/2 being more like NT, that seems to depend on who you believe.  

The native APIs are very similar - Microsoft and IBM designed them together, 
after all.  Sure, OS/2 has some POSIX-like features, but so does NT.  EMX was 
useful long before Cygwin was, but EMX is getting long in the tooth.  Yes, 
Innotek's LIBC helps here, but it is a work in progress.  And Microsoft is planning 
on incorporating "Services for Unix" into NT (this formerly
Interix product 
provides an EMX or Cygwin like environment).

With all that said, I think NT is just as "Unix-like" these days
as OS/2.  But I'd 
prefer to say that NT and OS/2 are more similar to each other than they are to 
Unix.  GPI and GDI are nothing like XLib.


-----------
"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly,
while bad people will find a way around the laws."
     - Plato (427-347 B.C.)




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