Best bang for buck with open source drivers.

[duby229]

Well, yes. Admittebly API has to be allowed to live and old versions of the API have to eventually be droppped. This simply because no sane person manages to predict every use scenario so the attempt for the API will be wrong. This has nothing to do with security holes though. So yes, I admit API has to go through changes (after having doing some conversing Elsewhere (tm)) as part of its natural evolution to better cope with tomorrow's challenges which simply weren't thought of yesterday.
But yeah, I still stand by my claim that saying actual API changes due to security reasons makes no sense whatsoever. (FUD as in the sense that the reasoning you gave is not only false but it was directed towards the emotional core of every admin: security. It's a bit like drawing child porn card in an arbitrary network filtering conversation, really Drawing them randomly when they're not actually related to the matter at hand is meant to be a conversation killer and an "I Win" card)

Security absolutely is an important reason to modify existing API's. I'm not saying its the only one, but I am saying that as an admin it is one of the reasons that I can relate to. As such that is the reason I mentioned security in the first place. I fully appreciate that there exists many usage scenarios, unfortunately I catn know all of them and can only relate what I know. In my field security is prime.

I didnt intend it to be a conversation killer per se, but I did intend to get my point across efficiantly. We've been swapping posts now for too long in my opinion about something that neither one of us is going to change our minds on. For some reason that you still havent justified you think it is a great idea to keep around incomplete, broken, insecure, unstable, flawed, poorly designed API's that have no possibilty of being fixed and will be replaced anyways....Fine.... I'm perfectly ok with that. There actually exists such a thing that does exactly what you want. Its called winsxs.

[nanonyme]

in the argoment of stable api: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html

"If Linux had to ensure that it preserve a stable source interface, a new interface would have been created, and the older, broken one would have had to be maintained over time, leading to extra work for the USB developers. Since all Linux USB developers do their work on their own time, asking programmers to do extra work for no gain, for free, is not a possibility." I agree, he makes good points. Might make no sense whatsoever on a free as in gratis operating system. Possibly more so in a commercial opensource operating system.

[yesterday]

"If Linux had to ensure that it preserve a stable source interface, a new interface would have been created, and the older, broken one would have had to be maintained over time, leading to extra work for the USB developers. Since all Linux USB developers do their work on their own time, asking programmers to do extra work for no gain, for free, is not a possibility." I agree, he makes good points. Might make no sense whatsoever on a free as in gratis operating system. Possibly more so in a commercial opensource operating system.

The benefit of this approach, regardless of the reasoning behind it, means that kernel and it's development is a lot more agile. It also in turn encourages in-tree participation, for the benefit of the kernel. Even a commercial open source OS can benefit from this.