good response from hardware vendors??

[rivurgurl]

Hi everyone,
I was wondering if it is a waste of time for me to email companies like Belkin & Linksys to request support for their hardware and to ask them to become more Linux friendly? I just emailed Broadcom and they had an auto reply for me to go straight to the hardware manufacturer with my request. How responsive are hardware companies anyway? Does MS already have non-compete agreements and the like? Well, anyway, I went ahead and emailed Belkin too since I would like to try out the new pre-n wireless card, but there is no driver yet.
Just pondering... I will let you know if I hear anything back!
RG

[drdebian]

I think you should in fact let them know what you think. It would be even better if you hadn't bought their product in the first place and told them why you didn't by from them, but the competition (who possibly support Linux properly).

[Kaitlyn]

It doesn't hurt to ask them, but it would probably help if you also tell them they don't necessarily have to develop the drivers. (Remember that companies do incur labor costs to make drivers.)

Tell them they only need to release full technical information without a non-disclosure agreement, and then the Linux and *BSD communities can produce drivers for ourselves. A donation to the Free Software Foundation and/or Sourceforge.net (which may be tax deductible for them) would also help and cost less than having to hire more programmer(s).

As for networking products, consider buying from SMC. All of my Barricade router's features are usable from Linux, and the manual even comes with enough information to set it up in Linux. The ISA NIC I got in 1997 came with a .c, and the PCI NIC I got in 2000 even came with a TurboLinux CD.