On 08/23/11 12:02, Paul Menzel wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 23.08.2011, 11:42 +0200 schrieb Kristian Amlie:
On 08/23/11 11:22, Daniel Mack wrote:
On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Paul Menzel wrote:
… and ask the manufacturer about GNU/Linux support.
Something like, you bought the hardware and expect it to work everywhere. Additionally they make money by selling the hardware and not developing a driver, so they should publish the documentation and even pay someone – like Daniel or Clemens ? – to write the support for their hardware. (Only when they say they do not have any money or something like that, you can also tell them to donate/provide free hardware for the developer and a contact address to their M$ Windows developer for questions.)
While I agree in general to your points, I think its not worth the effort in this particular case. It's probably very easy to add support for this by just sending one magic usb_control_msg up-front, and it's not complicated to sniff that value. From a customer standpoint, again, I'm sure the manufacturer will just state that they didn't promise any Linux support, and so you can't claim it.
Their homepage states "We are currently in the final phase of development in making all of our instruments class compliant.", which I take to mean that they want their future products to use a standard MIDI interface. Right now, Windows 7 and Vista 64 users are also left in the dark, so I think they are as eager to fix this as we are, they just decided to do it on the hardware side instead of the software side.
Still sending a message to them, would be good in my opinion.
- It shows them, that people are using their devices on GNU/Linux and
that their decision to make it class compliant is a good move. 2. If they want to change that, maybe they are even releasing the necessary documentation so you can save your time installing Windows.
FYI, I sent them a message saying that Linux support has been added. I thought it was better to put it in a positive light if we could: Now they know that their devices are used in Linux, *and* they got a driver for free!