"Atheros Communications has announced the release of free software wireless drivers for ath9k. The ath9k driver requires no proprietary binary blobs and works on several chipsets and over a dozen wireless devices..."

They have even criticized Nvidia specifically for not releasing free drivers. Nvidia responded.

The purpose of this essay is to illustrate by example the strengths and weaknesses of the open source development model versus the binary driver one.

Back at the Linux Foundation Austin Summit, VIA had announced plans to develop a new open-source initiative in a similar fashion what AMD has been doing. However, in the weeks following that they haven't done much for the open-source community.

We're taking a little departure this week from our sometimes successful attempt to be non-distro-specific, and looking at a neat little program that runs on Debian and Ubuntu flavors (including Ubuntu-derivatives, like Mint).

As a journalist, if a very different kind from Trudeau, I appreciate the sentiment. Looking back at 2007, who could have predicted that, after all the posturing by open source advocates, that the new version of the GNU General Public License would have caused so little division? Or that Linspire and Xandros would have followed Novell and made their own deals with Microsoft? Or that virtualization, which was such a hot topic in 2006, would have settled down to just another technology?

I've had a Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro video card for over 30 days now, and it's crossed my mind more than once to send it back to Newegg and get an nVidia replacement.

Device drivers can make or break an operating system. The best engineered kernel is useless if applications running on it cannot interface with the outside world or if device manufacturers cannot readily support it with their wares.