edbarx wrote:Huh, the Politics of Operating Systems!
It's not politics, its a policy - aka contract or insurance or a plan.
There are many distros which have a different policy and everyone is free to use them.
Trying to enforce a change of Debian policy is at least a nonsense (speaking gently), especially in a situation where it is possible to use closed source drivers without any restrictions (in fact, it's even possible to use drivers from other distros)
edbarx wrote:I will recount my experience struggling to breathlessness to make a Hantek USB oscilloscope properly work under Linux. Hantek only make drivers for MS Windows, (...)
Any Linux distribution, especially Debian or Devuan, would be a huge advancement with so many tools available. Currently, I run the simpler to use LTSpice simulator under WINE which works with sufficient speed to be useful and comfortable.
I've used Hantek oscilloscopes - their firmware is littered with bugs (starting from little bugs in GUI and ending with broken fourier transform or software bandwith limiter) - better buy FLUKE
LTSpice is just a closed-source fork of ngspice, and ngspice is packaged for Debian, and it can be used with KiCad or GEDA, and there's also a gnucap.
edbarx wrote:Why should a much much simpler application fail to work under Linux, for the simple reason of a political standing which has proven time and time again, it goes against most business practices, and most manufacturers are very hostile to adopting it as they want to protect their industrial secrets regarding internal hardware functioning?
Openness of driver code has completely nothing to do with "industrial secrets regarding internal hardware functioning" - drivers are communicating with the interface that the "internal hardware" is exposing to the outside world.
F.e. AMD opened the specification of their GPUs, allowing to create open source drivers - have they bankrupt?
Now we have fully Linux-compatible AMD driver stack, while NVIDIA's drivers are just a hack which works only in typical use cases, and they lag behind regarding support for newest kernels.
BTW: NVIDIA's compressed (!) driver package for Winblows takes almost 500MB - obviously this is not just the driver, but that deserves a separate thread (on Windows forums
)
"Know-how protection" - I've heard this excuse many times, but it has nothing to do with reality, where usually this means
"Don't know how - protection". Proprietary software is never truly tested, exactly because of today's "business practices": software development takes 10% of time, testing/QA takes 90% - so accordingly to the best "business practices", the proprietry drivers are not fully tested - they are tested by the users...
Open source code ensures higher quality, because it is tested by the developers, who really do care about their reputation, which is tightly tied to the quality of source code - and this makes a huge difference.