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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 30 January 2008 | |
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Hohndel, who works for Intel as the chief of technology for Linux and open source, spoke on the topic "Make hardware vendors love open source". He made one telling point at the start of the talk: you can debate all you like about getting open source drivers for hardware, but finally only money talks. Open source had a tremendous impact on hardware vendors, he said, simply because in today's world billions ("and that's with a big 'B'") of dollars are spent on making hardware that ends up being used running open source software. One statistic he cited was that 10 per cent of the money in IT was spent on mega-data centres used by big companies like Yahoo! and Google - and, apart from Microsoft, all were building on open source. And another was equally impressive - a third of all wireless access points are running Linux. However, the fact that Linux was running on such a large number of hardware devices did not mean that the vendors had to understand open source. Hohndel said it was difficult to quantify how much money a company would lose by not using open source. However, it was possible to put a figure on what it would cost a proprietary vendor to open up its IP to the world - and many companies valued their IP at a significant percentage of their market cap. Hence, rather than release documentation that would make it possible for open source drivers to be written, vendors preferred to either completely ignore Linux or only release binary drivers and rely on the community to reverse-engineer the hardware in order to create open source drivers. |
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